Diapason d'or

Through his “brilliance and maturity” (as described by The Guardian) the Russian-Lithuanian pianist Lukas Geniušas has established himself on the international scene as one of the most interesting artists of his generation. He has appeared in London's Wigmore Hall, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Milan's Salle Verdi, Moscow's Conservatory and Roque d'Anthéron, and with orchestras such as the Philharmonique de Radio France, the National de Lyon, the NHK of Tokyo, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, the Russian National Orchestra, the list goes on... He has chosen here a Prokofiev programme combining early works from his younger years (the Ten Pieces Op. 12 which is a junior work and yet so intimately prokofievian already!) with the work from his first stage of maturity (Second Sonata from 1912) and the work from his full maturity (the Fifth Sonata). Even better, this Fifth Sonata was written "for the first time" in 1923 after his time in Paris, then revised three decades later under the constraint, undoubtedly, of the infamous Jdanov decree which had accused the composer of all anti-Soviet evils, but also due to a very personal concern (he wanted to purify the piano gesture). In a way this work seems almost "Parisian" as it has so many similarities with Poulenc's style. © SM/Qobuz

Here's something fascinating: music from the 14th and early 15th centuries, lost for hundreds of years, has now been rediscovered thanks to some space-age technology. Because, in fact, the original manuscripts were never lost. In reality, the paper had been scrubbed and recycled or covered over with palimpsests because of the prohibitive price of parchment at the time. And so a whole body of Florentine works from the era of Petrarch, Boccacio, Dante and Machiavelli was erased to make room for 16th century poems. A careful examination of the San Lorenzo Palimpsest revealed that multi-spectral photography (anyone who knows what that is, raise your hand…) of the pages can render the underlying layer perfectly legible, and so now 111 pages of music from the 14th century can see the light of day. After six hundred years of multi-spectral silence, these pieces are interpreted here by the La Morra ensemble, which specialises in late medieval and Renaissance music with voice and instruments like the lute, vielle, clavicymbalum and recorder. There is an intensity of emotion in hearing these pieces which until now we never knew existed, written by composers of whom we know almost nothing such as Giovanni Mazzuoli and his son Piero, Paolo da Firenze or Jacopo da Bologna. Here they take centre stage. © SM/Qobuz

To say that the concerto was one of Haydn's favourite forms would be a bit much, daft even. The man wrote a good hundred symphonies, dozens of quartets, trios, piano sonatas, fifteen or so masses and as many operas, and oratorios... Currently we know of three violin concertos (others being lost or apocryphal), two cello concertos (others... see above), one horn concerto, one for trumpet (there are no others) and at most about ten concertos for piano. Musically, they are fascinating works, but the level of technical skill they demand runs from moderate to a bit tricky. But the First Cello Concerto is not without its moments of difficulty, such as the rapid high notes in the final movement, and it offers some real fireworks. It should also be noted that most of the concertos were written for Esterházy, specifically for the first soloists in the house orchestra of Konzertmeister Luigi Tomasini and first cellist Joseph Weigl. The orchestral accompaniments offered the soloists some fine backdrops: in particular in the second movement of the Concerto for violin in C Major , with the orchestra's string section accompanying the solo violin with a sort of lute-playing that becomes a kind of serenade à la Don Giovanni. Amandine Beyer takes up the violin for this recording, while Marco Ceccato deals with the cello solo – both members of the Gli Incogniti ensemble ("The Unknowns"), a fluid grouping that plays without a conductor. Their leaderless style means that the musicians all listen to one another: it's a lovely way of making music (and sadly rare in the world of orchestras). © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. Volumes 4, 5 and the first half of the 6th include the entire Second Book, published in 1717. His seven orders, which vary hugely in size, contain some pieces that have become famous outside their context: Les Moissoneurs and Les Baricades Mistérieuses. Anna Magdalena Bach had included the Bergeries in her Clavierbüchlein dating from 1725 - proof that Bach held Couperin in very high esteem. In the Eleventh Order we find the satirical piece Les Fastes de la Grande et Ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx, a joke by Couperin which we should read as "Ménéstrandise.” This was a brotherhood of musicians founded in 1321 who tried to impose a tax on musicians who were not members, including harpsichordists. Couperin was one of those who protested before the King and the Ménéstrandise was dissolved. The Second Book is divided between two harpsichords, a copy of a Parisian instrument by Antoine Vater (1738) and the copy of the 1624 Ruckers harpsichord again, which had been used for L'Art de toucher le clavecin. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The Fourth Book was published in 1730, when the composer was sixty-two years old and his health was deteriorating. He stated in his preface, "as my health is getting worse from day to day, my friends have advised me to stop working and I have not written any major works since". It is composed of eight orders, but it should be noted that these sequences become shorter and shorter, with only four or five movements in some of them – miniscule if we compare them, for example, to the First Order from Book One which had about twenty! To bid farewell to the life and music of the great Couperin, Carole Cerasi selected a French instrument by Antoine Vater from 1738 - around the same time as the publication of his final Book, which covers the eighth, ninth and tenth (last) volumes of this complete work. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. Volumes 4, 5 and the first half of the 6th include the entire Second Book, published in 1717. His seven orders, which vary hugely in size, contain some pieces that have become famous outside their context: Les Moissoneurs and Les Baricades Mistérieuses. Anna Magdalena Bach had included the Bergeries in her Clavierbüchlein dating from 1725 - proof that Bach held Couperin in very high esteem. In the Eleventh Order we find the satirical piece Les Fastes de la Grande et Ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx, a joke by Couperin which we should read as "Ménéstrandise.” This was a brotherhood of musicians founded in 1321 who tried to impose a tax on musicians who were not members, including harpsichordists. Couperin was one of those who protested before the King and the Ménéstrandise was dissolved. The Second Book is divided between two harpsichords, a copy of a Parisian instrument by Antoine Vater (1738) and the copy of the 1624 Ruckers harpsichord again, which had been used for L'Art de toucher le clavecin. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The first volume opens with L'art, which Cerasi performs on an Antwerp Ruckers model from 1624; it continues with the First Book which also covers the second and third volumes. This book contains five orders; it was published in 1713, although several of the pieces it contains had been written years earlier. For the First Book , Carole Cerasi plays an Antwerp harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers, built in 1636 and reworked in 1763 in Paris by Henri Hemsch, giving a Franco-Flemish sound! © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The first volume opens with L'art, which Cerasi performs on an Antwerp Ruckers model from 1624; it continues with the First Book which also covers the second and third volumes. This book contains five orders; it was published in 1713, although several of the pieces it contains had been written years earlier. For the First Book , Carole Cerasi plays an Antwerp harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers, built in 1636 and reworked in 1763 in Paris by Henri Hemsch, giving a Franco-Flemish sound! © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. Volumes 4, 5 and the first half of the 6th include the entire Second Book, published in 1717. His seven orders, which vary hugely in size, contain some pieces that have become famous outside their context: Les Moissoneurs and Les Baricades Mistérieuses. Anna Magdalena Bach had included the Bergeries in her Clavierbüchlein dating from 1725 - proof that Bach held Couperin in very high esteem. In the Eleventh Order we find the satirical piece Les Fastes de la Grande et Ancienne Mxnxstrxndxsx, a joke by Couperin which we should read as "Ménéstrandise.” This was a brotherhood of musicians founded in 1321 who tried to impose a tax on musicians who were not members, including harpsichordists. Couperin was one of those who protested before the King and the Ménéstrandise was dissolved. The Second Book is divided between two harpsichords, a copy of a Parisian instrument by Antoine Vater (1738) and the copy of the 1624 Ruckers harpsichord again, which had been used for L'Art de toucher le clavecin. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The Fourth Book was published in 1730, when the composer was sixty-two years old and his health was deteriorating. He stated in his preface, "as my health is getting worse from day to day, my friends have advised me to stop working and I have not written any major works since". It is composed of eight orders, but it should be noted that these sequences become shorter and shorter, with only four or five movements in some of them – miniscule if we compare them, for example, to the First Order from Book One which had about twenty! To bid farewell to the life and music of the great Couperin, Carole Cerasi selected a French instrument by Antoine Vater from 1738 - around the same time as the publication of his final Book, which covers the eighth, ninth and tenth (last) volumes of this complete work. © SM/Qobuz

Staying true to himself, harpsichordist Jean Rondeau stirs up another musical storm. In his interpretation of around fifteen Sonatas by Scarlatti, he unleashes a kind of rawness, a poetic rawness, as if he had invented the sonatas on the spot. But no, no, they are indeed Scarlatti’s sonatas! On the other hand, Domenico's letter to Queen Marie-Barbara de Bragança, found in the accompanying booklet, is factually apocryphal. She was his pupil as early as 1720 and continued to be until her royal marriage to the Spanish court; it seems that it was for her that he wrote his approximately five hundred and fifty-five sonatas, that is to say that he had found a student worthy of his genius. The farce on the ninth track is also apocryphal, which Rondeau uses as an interlude between the two “parts” of his programme. It is a funny little improvisation of jumbled notes and clusters - enough to clean the ears between the two Scarlattis. The instrument used here is quite amazing; it is a harpsichord “based on German models”, built in 2006 by Jonte Knif & Arno Pelto. It offers an extremely rich sound with a rather unusual tone, showing that it takes more than just pressing the keys of a harpsichord to get the desired sound. With his very personal technique, Rondeau makes his harpsichord wonderfully unique, giving the baroque music an incredibly modern feel. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The Third Book was published in 1722, when the composer was fifty-four years old. In the preface he attacks some of the performers rather harshly: "I am always surprised (after the care I have taken to mark the embellishments that suit my Pieces) to hear some people who do not obey them. It is an unforgivable negligence to fail to include these musical flourishes, especially since they have not been added arbitrarily. I therefore declare that my pieces must be executed exactly as I have marked them. They will never make a lasting impression on people with good taste unless everything that I have marked on the scores is observed to the letter, no more no less.". The Third Book and its seven orders is divided between the second half of Carole Cerasi's sixth volume, the seventh, and the first half of the eighth. We find two harpsichords here again; a copy of a Parisian Pascal Taskin from 1769 and a copy of a Jean-Claude Goujon from 1749. © SM/Qobuz

François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords. The first volume opens with L'art, which Cerasi performs on an Antwerp Ruckers model from 1624; it continues with the First Book which also covers the second and third volumes. This book contains five orders; it was published in 1713, although several of the pieces it contains had been written years earlier. For the First Book , Carole Cerasi plays an Antwerp harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers, built in 1636 and reworked in 1763 in Paris by Henri Hemsch, giving a Franco-Flemish sound! © SM/Qobuz

Sir Andrew Davis returns to his exploration of Holst’s orchestral works with the brilliant BBC Philharmonic, a series initiated almost ten years ago by the late Richard Hickox, then taken over by another expert in British repertoire. This selection of orchestral works by Holst provides a remarkable overview of his career, ranging from such early works as A Winder Idyll – composed in 1897 when he was still studying at the Royal College of Music – to the Scherzo of a symphony on which he was working towards the end of his life. None of the music recorded here was published in his lifetime, and the Scherzo – rarely heard though it is – is the only work to have entered the repertoire. A Moorside Suite, originally written for brass band, is featured here in the composer's rarely heard arrangement for strings. The young British cellist Guy Johnston is the soloist in Invocation, one of Holst’s most significant works, calling for a subtle balance of virtuosity and expressive qualities. © Chandos

For her first recital with orchestra album, young Franco-Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig had the idea of presenting five pairs of songs in which each part of the pair is ambiguously related to the other, like a mirror’s reflection. This process leads to striking juxtapositions of different musical styles, dramatic moments, historical periods and contrasting voices; classicism and romanticism complement each other, terror answers joy, and the result is a view of the feminine soul all its facets. The first pairing involves two mirrors: the one in which Marguerite from Gounod's Faust admires herself and Thaïs's mirror in Massenet's opera (Thaïs). There follows Puccini's vision of Manon Lescaut, and then Manon (sans Lescaut) as imagined by Massenet. Following this we have Juliette, this is a rather daring pairing of the largely-forgotten early romantic German composer Daniel Steibelt with Gounod's Juliette. Elsa Dreisig then moves onto the two famous Figaros, one from Rossini's Barber (Rosina) and the other from Mozart's Marriage, with the gentle tones of the Countess. Finally, and more daring still, we end with the Salome of the Hérodiade by Massenet, a tender young woman who is not after anyone's head; and then Strauss's Salome, with her sanguinary madness. Probably in order to avoid the temptation of comparisons with other recordings, our singer has opted for the 1907 French version – note that this work by Oscar Wilde was itself originally written in French. This is the most extraordinary selection that one could hope for in a first recording from any artist, all accompanied by the Montpelier Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schønwandt. © SM/Qobuz

The first solo album from the excellent youngster Julien Behr, who has already played at the Paris Opéra, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, the Bordeaux and Lyon Opera Houses and cities such as Salzburg, Vienna, London, Cologne and many other great venues as well as making recordings of various lyrical works including L’Enfant et les sortilèges with Bavarian Radio. As debut albums go, he has made a daring choice in selecting some of the more unknown areas of French opera rather than the more popular pieces from Don José, Romeo, Faust and other big names. Instead, he has taken some gems from the Romantic repertoire (if we extend it up to the First World War for the sake of argument) which are little-heard of. From Gounod, he has selected Cinq-Mars ; from Bizet, La Jolie fille de Perth (one of Bizet's most exquisite passages); from Thomas, Mignon; and then, better-known but still uncommon, Léhar The Merry Widow; Godard, Jocelyn; and Delibes Lakmé. His diction is utterly impeccable; his transparent and airy voice evokes Heddle Nach or Jussi Björling, which serves the repertoire perfectly. The album closes with a few hits from the Romantic repertoire such as Vous qui passez sans me voir by Charles Trenet – well, the lyrics are from the Fou chantant, while the music is by Johnny Hess and Paul Misraki, and the song was originally written for Jean Sablon – evidence of Behr's love of lighter genres, for sure. . © SM/Qobuz