Gli Angeli Genève and their conductor, Stephan MacLeod, have specialized mostly in Baroque oratorio and other Baroque music for voices and instruments. An a cappella recording of Josquin Desprez marks a new departure for them, but it is one that testifies to the vocal virtuosity of this group. The album includes Josquin's Missa Malheur me bat, a parody mass based on a lost original and even more intricate than most of the composer's masses. Gli Angeli Genève sings it with two voices per part, also a change from the group's earlier releases that have featured refreshingly large ensembles. This is perhaps the black belt among vocal performance procedures, with a subtle balance between vocal blend and the individuality of the single voices. It is a smaller group than would have sung the music during Josquin's life, and it diminishes the impact of the various solo passages that MacLeod logically adds to the music. However, the vocal pairs often have a strong emotional impact in these somber pieces, mostly in the Phrygian mode with its dark opening half-step (the mood brightens only with the final motet Preter rerum seriem). Sample the well-trodden chanson Mille regretz, where the small group does make sense. The program breaks up the mass with motets and chansons, which makes less sense when the interpolated pieces are not particularly related to the mass. Yet many of the individual performances have a powerful, emotionally intimate feel, and the handling of the double-voice forces is gorgeous. Another draw is the resonant sound from the Église Saint-Germain in Geneva. An intriguing new turn from this durable early music ensemble. © James Manheim /TiVo

On his third album as Christine and the Queens—but also using the new moniker Redcar—the artist now known simply as Chris isn't pushing boundaries so much as flying over them. "My journey with gender has always been tumultuous. It's raging right now, as I'm just exploring what is beyond this," he said in a May 2022 interview, around the time he announced his adoption of masculine pronouns. "A way to express it could be switching between they and she. I kind of want to tear down that system that made us label genders in such a strict way … I think the answer is to be flickery, fluid, escaping." That's also a pretty good description of his music, which is equally, and charmingly, hard to pin down. Opener "Ma bien aimée bye bye" finds Chris, as Redcar, adopting a chanteur's pose against the late-night cabaret sounds of slinky guitars and shimmering high-hat. Sung in a seamless mélange of French and English, it's a seductive goodbye but still, it's "my life till I die." (It completely fits Chris's estimation of the Redcar personality, which he has also called a "poetic and philosophical construction"—a very Bowie thing to say—as "suave and sophisticated.") While the last Christine and the Queens album leaned heavily into hard-edged '90s funk, here there are more references to the crisp-heavy bottom beats of Shannon-style '80s dance pop, especially on "la chanson du chevalier"—remarkable for its ethereally circling round-robin vocals, ranging from high and sweet ("the man I love") to a richer lead and sharp back-up—and Grace Jones-esque industrial rhythms. "Tu sais ce qu'il me faut" adopts Jones' unique binary of wild and controlled, while "Les âmes amantes" sounds like it's from another planet: liquid and layered. There's also dancefloor euphoria ("Looking for love"), powerful synth-heavy moments ("Les étoiles," aka the stars), airy sweetness ("rien dire") and an Annie Lennox cool breeze ("la clairefontaine"). A groovy eight-and-a-half-minute epic, "Combien de temps" samples electropop pioneer Gina X. "Je te vois enfin" sets up an intriguing mystery: "Oh-oh, my father I believe they have sinned," the lyrics translate to English. "It's impossible in your books not to sin." But Chris—Redcar—is perhaps most revealing on "Mémoire des ailes." The song is so clean and hymn-like, it sounds sacred, with vocals that completely envelop even as the music edgily stutters and shudders. "I'll teach you a game, I'll teach ya," he sings, at once a promise and a tease. © Shelly Ridenour/Qobuz

Björn Schmelzer and his ensemble provide their special vision in this Josquin Desprez anniversary. With the conviction that Josquin, during his late years, produced works in sight of his own death, Graindelavoix renders compositions included in Tielman Susato’s 1545 Antwerp print (Septiesme livre de chansons, published 24 years after the composer’s life ended). With an all-male vocal ensemble and a subtle instrumental accompaniment, Graindelavoix again goes beyond all standards and presents another ground-breaking interpretation of well-known repertoire. Added to Josquin’s compositions are three laments for his own death, written by Gombert, Vinders and Appenzeller. Gombert’s deploration Musae Jovis is one of his most breathtaking compositions, finishing with an exceptional dance à l’antique in which subterranean, terrestrial and heavenly elements indulge together praising the undead composer Josquin. © Glossa

Salle des Pas Perdus is a soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist, but if it did, Coralie Clément says that the movie could be Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 A Bout de Souffle. And just as in the movie, Clément's debut record deftly moves between high art and pop culture, from classical arrangements to lushly orchestrated pop to bossa nova, all the while making winks toward '60s French pop. Coralie, in fact, sounds like a young Jane Birkin, and even the cover photo on the CD -- a timeless, stunningly beautiful, and melancholy Clément shot on a Paris street through a red filter -- evokes the artwork on records of such French chanteuses as Françoise Hardy. This album is a result of a collaborative effort that recalls the Serge Gainsbourg/Jane Birkin relationship: Each of the album's tunes was written and arranged by noted composer/writer/performer Benjamin Biolay, Coralie's brother. His themes range from the illusory nature of love ("La Mer Opale," a wistful love song about the moon and the sea, Biolay's trumpet accompanying his sister's almost-whispered vocals as waves wash in the background; theatrical, maybe even kitschy, but utterly lovely), samba ("Samba de Mon Coeur Qui Bat," a swank, loungy bossa nova that echoes Astrud Gilberto), and lighthearted debauchery ("Le Jazz et le Gin"). It is somehow all cohesive, each of the songs a self-contained vignette that pieces together the larger theme of the album. Fans of '60s French pop will feel that they've unearthed a buried jewel in this record.© Kim Reick Kunoff /TiVo

Cuban-born American soprano Lisette Oropesa is a newcomer to the world of opera singers, releasing an album devoted to the French operas of Rossini and Donizetti. Unusually, she was thrust into the public eye when a member of the audience sang an excerpt from La Traviata with her during a recital at the Verdi Festival in Parma, Italy, in 2021. The video immediately went viral around the world.The young singer has become a real star since her debut at the MET in New York, where she played Susanna in The marriage of Figaro at the age of 22, and then went on to receive great success at the Paris Opera in Abduction from the Seraglio (Konstanze), Rigoletto (Gilda) and The Barber of Seville (Rosina). She dedicates this brilliant recital with the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra (conducted by Corrado Rovaris) to the ‘Grande Boutique’, the nickname given by Verdi to the Paris Opera.There are excerpts from Rossini's Siège de Corinthe, Guillaume Tell and Comte Ory alongside Donizetti’s Les Martyrs, Lucia di Lammermoor and La Fille du regiment. The latter concludes the album with his famous Salut à la France, which was patriotically performed on bank holiday evenings on the 14th of July in many French opera houses. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York on 28th December 1940 – the start of the German occupation – this aria was sung by Lily Pons and followed by La Marseillaise (the French national anthem) sung by soloists and chorus. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Reflets was Stivell's debut full-length solo album, although he had done some obscure singles and EPs in France in the late 1960s and had recorded under his original name, Alan Cochevelou, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sometimes, when you find the first recording of a folk-rock-aligned artist dating from this era, you'll be surprised to hear rock or even psychedelic elements that would be ironed out or disappear by the time the performer reached a wide audience. This, however, is not the case on Reflets, on which the format and vision that has sustained Stivell throughout his lengthy career are largely in place. His harp, by turns energetic and effervescent, is the focal point of arrangements that bow to contemporary but folk-based electric influences. True, there are touches of electric organ, electric bass, 12-string guitar, banjo, fiddle, and electric guitar. Yet the mood is very much pensive Celtic folk, all but two of the songs being folk standards adapted and arranged by Stivell; only one, "Sally Free and Easy," is sung in English. "Broceliande," one of just two Stivell originals on the LP, is the most adventurous (if atypical) track, with its "Exodus"-like melody and eerie female backup vocals. Although this was issued in the U.K. under the title Reflections in the early 1970s, it apparently never came out in the U.S., where it remains very hard to find. © Richie Unterberger /TiVo

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The Chansonnier of Bayeux, a luxury manuscript for a collection of ditties. Here the pieces belong to all kinds of genres: love songs (sometimes courtly, more often bawdy), drinking songs, satires, women’s songs, others dealing with events and characters from the Hundred Years’ War (Le Roy engloys and Hellas Ollivier Vasselin). Only pious songs are not featured: even the incipit Belle tres doulce, mère Dieu surreptitiously leads to rather lewd verse. A poetical and musical contrast can be at the very heart of some songs (J’ai veu la beaulté m’amye). Some of the themes have floated through the centuries; thus the dialogue of a father and his rebellious daughter in La belle se siet, already set to music at the time of Guillaume Dufaÿ, will turn into our children’s song Ne pleure pas, Jeannette, sung to an altogether different melody. The upper classes of the late XVth century would appreciate the many sexual innuendoes and the "popular" situations referring to unhappily married women cuckolding their husbands, drunks, soldiers complaining that they have not been paid, and even a menagerie of noisy animals (a donkey in My my). No doubt the audience hugely enjoyed these stagings of country life, real or fictitious, as they did in the XIIIth century when listening to some motets and pastoral songs of trouvères. © Paraty