The Miroirs Étendus Company is a strong proponent of open-minded creation with a focus on the audience. Throughout this amazing album, they follow a sensitive line of thought. From Wagner to contemporary music, through to Debussy, the young composer Othman Louati gives this fascinating programme an atmosphere of extraordinary gentleness. © B Records

A serpent woman haunts Cecile McLorin Salvant's dreams on her boldly realized seventh album, 2023's Mélusine. Inspired by the European folktale most famously detailed by 14th century French writer Jean d'Arras, Mélusine tells the tale of a shapeshifting maiden, half-serpent/half-woman, whose righteous anger takes on ever-more dualistic meanings under Salvant's dynamic musical sway. Having been lavished with accolades, including several Grammy Awards for her clarion, swinging jazz and French chanson-infused albums, Salvant has increasingly leaned into the more stylistically experimental and personal aspects of her artistry. It was an approach she took to new levels with 2022's Ghost Song, performing her poetic originals alongside unexpected covers of songs by Kate Bush and Sting. Centered on the title track, which she composed during the Ghost Song sessions, Mélusine is a gorgeously realized production. Although there are some English lyrics here, the album features the most French Salvant has sung on record. Thankfully, she offers translations of each song with a sentence that also highlights how each track illuminates the story.The album also finds Salvant (who produced the album with Tom Korkidis) pulling together all of her disparate influences, from her moody cabaret jazz reading of Charles Trenet's "La Route Enchantee" to her playfully mischievous interpretation of the 14th century composition "Dites Moi Que Je Suis Belle," the latter of which is done in dancerly duet with djembe percussion master Weedie Braimah. Along with Braimah, she's joined throughout by several longtime associates including pianists Sullivan Fortner and Aaron Diehl, bassists Paul Sikivie and Luques Curtis, drummers Kyle Pool and Obed Calvaire, and saxophonist Godwin Louis. Shifting the line-up track to track, Salvant offers inspired forays into '70s sci-fi-inspired Canadian musical theater ("Petite Musique Terrienne" from Starmania), the dramatic French pop of Veronique Sanson ("Le Temps est Assassin"), and an Afro-Latin take on 12th century troubadour Almuc Castelnau's "Dame Iseut" that Salvant sings in both Occitan and Haitian Creole, languages that underline her own rich dual heritage. There's even a synthesizer-accented take on Michel Lambert's haunting 1660 air de coeur "D'un Feu Secret" that sounds like electronic composer Suzanne Ciani, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Modern Jazz Quartet giving a Baroque court performance. Her originals here are just as stylistically wide-ranging as she pulls together jazz and Haitian compas rhythms on "Doudou," accompanies herself on analog synth on "Wedo," and weaves a dreamy overlay of vocals and electric piano on "Aida." It almost goes without saying that Salvant's voice is utterly sublime on Mélusine, rich with an earthy jazz warmth on one song and shimmering with a brightly attenuated operatic resonance on another. There's also a feeling that for her, the story of a half-serpent half-woman is in keeping with her life as a Black woman raised in Miami by a Haitian father and French mother. Whether it's with the themes of romantic heartbreak and bodily autonomy, or the global boundary-pushing musicality at play on Mélusine, Salvant's work is transcendent.© Matt Collar /TiVo

This double-album release from the specialist Palazzetto Bru Zane label, better known for opera but doing fine here with orchestral music, landed on classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023, and this is really no wonder. The album puts together many attractive features, beginning with fine work from the beefy (34 violins) Orchestre National de Lyon under conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. The album comprises a little history of the French tone poem from the third quarter of the 19th century to the second decade of the 20th, and it includes many works that will be unfamiliar to all but specialists, along with a few hits (Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre, Op. 40, Paul Dukas' L'apprenti sorcier ["The Sorcerer's Apprentice"] in a brisk, colorful performance, Emmanuel Chabrier's España, and perhaps Franck's Le chasseur maudit). As for the rest, there are no fewer than four works by women composers: Lili Boulanger, Augusta Holmès, Mel Bonis, and Charlotte Sohy; the Danse mystique of the latter is perhaps both the most obscure and the most compelling. Several works by better-known male composers also seem well worth removal from the historical scrap heap; sample Ernest Chausson's hushed Viviane, Op. 5, or Vincent d'Indy's Istar, Op. 42, the tone poem Wagner never wrote. Or the title work by Henri Duparc, much more familiar as a song composer. More generally, one is impressed by the cohesion of the program as a whole, even as French styles underwent fundamental change. Most of the composers try to show a mastery of the large orchestra and of the big tune as second subject. This is a highly listenable group of pieces that hearers will be glad to know better.© James Manheim /TiVo

This 2023 release inaugurates an ongoing series from baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz, performing Schubert works two centuries on from their date of composition, and slated to culminate in 2028, the bicentennial of the composer's death. The project begins with one of the most famous Schubert song cycles of all, Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, depicting the crackup and despair of a young wanderer who falls in love with a beautiful miller's daughter. Hasselhorn has plenty of recent competition in this cycle; listeners can sample the 2017 recording by Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber for another approach, but this one promises well for the ongoing project. Die schöne Müllerin is a work in which Schubert took vast strides toward the emancipation of the piano in the lied, and Bushakevitz leans into this aspect, with details that illuminate and often foreshadow themes developing in the text. Hasselhorn has a warm baritone with an appealing conversational tone that turns chilly and quiet toward the cycle's downer conclusion. Another draw is Harmonia Mundi's sound from the b-sharp studio in Berlin; the engineers put Bushakevitz just a bit forward in the mix, not so much as to sap energy from Hasselhorn's singing, but enough to highlight his perceptive performance. This release bodes well indeed for the duo's future work.© James Manheim /TiVo

It is hard to figure out what pianist Emmanuel Despax had in mind for the concept of this album. Its various titles offer three ideas: Après un rêve comes from the title of a Fauré song Despax transcribes for his program opener, plus there is "Belle Époque: Nights at the Piano." None of these is of much use; few pieces other than the Fauré are particularly dreamy, and the largest piece, Poulenc's Soirées de Nazelles, is from the nervous 1930s and nowhere near the Belle Époque in time or mood. As for "Nights at the Piano," that fits the Poulenc nicely but not the concluding Gaspard de la Nuit of Ravel, which is an imposing virtuoso concert work carrying none of the connotations of "Nights at the Piano." Really, Despax excels in none of these three ways but rather in a fourth: he hits on an intriguing mix of familiar standards and unusual works. Among the latter group are the Soirées de Nazelles, which Poulenc disclaimed and, perhaps for that reason, have been seldom heard. They are delightful pieces that bear titles describing qualities, like the numbers of a Baroque French suite, but actually seem to have been devised by Poulenc to describe members of a group of his friends, like Elgar's Enigma Variations. The result is a work that distills the hint of improvisation that pervades some of Poulenc's keyboard music and songs, and Despax gives it the right lively, spontaneous feel. The Nocturne, Op. 165, of Cécile Chaminade and the keyboard version of Henri Duparc's Aux étoiles are also nice finds. As for the more heavily trodden works, Debussy's Clair de lune is pleasantly moody, although no one would select this album for the rote Gaspard de la Nuit or the rather un-macabre Danse Macabre, Op. 40, of Saint-Saëns. For Poulenc lovers, however, this is an important find. © James Manheim /TiVo

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