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Franco Mezzena & Elena Ballario – La Recherche (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 58:14 minutes | 843 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Odradek Records
A sumptuous album of French and Belgian music for violin and piano, performed with unique intimacy and poetry by long-term partners Franco Mezzena and Elena Ballario.
Cesar Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major is his most celebrated work, a perfect example of cyclical form resulting in music of ardour and spirit, the two protagonists engaged in a lively and exhilarating dialogue that culminates in a thrilling finale. Franck had promised a violin sonata to Cosima Wagner, but it was Eugene Ysaye’s request for a wedding piece that finally galvanised him to compose the work.
Debussy’s Violin Sonata was his last complete composition, written in the shadow of the First World War. The work reflects some of the internal tussle the composer was experiencing during the conflict, but with his characteristic fluidity and nuanced harmonies. Debussy said of the work: “Through a quite humane contradiction, it is full of a joyous tumult”.
Franco Fagioli – Veni, Vidi, Vinci (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:11:09 minutes | 2,64 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
Too often confused by journalists or distracted music lovers with the Italian Renaissance genius, Leonardo Vinci was an eighteenth-century Neapolitan Baroque composer whose reputation stems mainly from his thirty-seven operas composed for the great castrates of his time and performed at the Royal Chapel of Naples where he was the successor to Alessandro Scarlatti. After his album devoted to a selection of arias by Handel, Argentine countertenor Franco Fagioli chose a dozen arias from Leonardo Vinci’s operas, more than half of which are world premieres. These include voluptuous and virtuosic arias from Il trionfo di Camilla, Gismondo, re di Polonia, L’Ernelinda, Alessandro nell’Indie and Medo.
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Franco Fagioli, Armonia Atenea, George Petrou – Rossini (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:15:20 minutes | 1,35 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Deutsche Grammophon (DG)
Countertenor performances of 19th century opera are a historical and, ultimately, true novelty. This said, for those who love the sound of the countertenor voice and want to give it a try, there are several factors that recommend this release by countertenor Franco Fagioli, with the small orchestra Armonia Atenea under George Petrou. First is that castrati were still around in Rossini’s time, although on the decline, and the composer was reportedly intrigued by their voices. Second, Fagioli, unlike the vast majority of other countertenors, studied bel canto singing rather than Baroque repertory exclusively, and a certain distance present in the work of other countertenors is absent here. And third, and most important, is Fagioli’s voice itself. Of the countertenors active today, he’s the one with the range, the power, the attitude to make you suspend disbelief and think for a moment that you’re actually listening to a castrato. He enters into the various Rossini roles represented on this recording, several of which were mezzo-soprano “pants” roles; this adds to the layers of identity-switching happening, and the parts hit Fagioli’s vocal sweet spot. A bonus is that several of these are from Rossini opere serie that are little played or recorded. Semiramide is one that has continued to hold the stage, however; sample one of Fagioli’s arias of Arsace, the Assyrian commander, and marvel at the power and dramatic sense. This could be a breakthrough for Fagioli in the crowded countertenor field.
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Frank Dupree, Wurttemberg Chamber Orchestra of Heilbronn & Case Scaglione – Kapustin: Orchestral Works (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:04:04 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CapriccioNR
“…our life is like jazz improvisation, it should always be spontaneous, always in the moment, and always free”. (Nikolai Kapustin)
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Frank DeVol – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1968/2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 30:10 minutes | 671 MB | Genre: Soundtrack
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © RCA Victor – Legacy
Frank DeVol was never quite a household name, but for a few years in the 1960s, his name came into millions of American households every week, sometimes more than once each week. As a bandleader and arranger, he was one of the busiest working musicians of the ’50s and ’60s, and as a composer, he wrote more than 50 movie scores but it was his theme music for series such as My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch by which he came into our homes and pop culture consciousness.
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Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes – Sticky (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 28:32 minutes | 356 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © International Death Cult
Sticky, the new album from Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes, is the sonic eruption of a year-plus of suppressed energy. While it’s an escapist experience, recent reality is never too far away. It’s there in ‘Go Get A Tattoo’, which was inspired by Carter’s experience of having to shut his first London based tattoo parlour, Rose of Mercy, almost immediately after it opened. It’s just as present in ‘My Town’, a suburban vignette of society’s collective mental health quickly unravelling.
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François-Xavier Roth, Les Siècles – Stravinsky: Ballets Russes (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 02:09:05 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi
Paris, early twentieth century: in the space of three ballets, a previously unknown Russian composer revolutionised the music of his time. With The Firebird and Petrushka, respectively fairytale and folktale, and of course The Rite of Spring, a telluric invocation with its insanely innovative harmonies and rhythms, Stravinsky dynamised the Late Romantic orchestra, taking it to literally unheard-of places. Among the very first musicians to perform these works on the instruments that witnessed their birth, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles inaugurated a far-reaching rediscovery of these seminal pieces, giving today’s listeners an opportunity to appreciate to the full their audacity and their harsh, savage power.
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François-Frédéric Guy – Montalbetti: Solos, a Personal Diary in Music (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:06:42 minutes | 693 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
This album of ‘solos’ for various different instruments constitutes the composer’s ‘personal diary’ over some twenty-five years. Eric Montalbetti, who was artistic director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France from 1996 to 2014, long kept his music a secret, composing for himself, as if he were keeping a diary. Yet he had been composing since the age of eleven, while also learning the piano and the organ. He was taught by Paul Méfano and Michaël Levinas, and attended masterclasses with George Benjamin and Magnus Lindberg. In 1990 he received prizes from the Sacem and the Menuhin Foundation for his Violin Sonata. He seeks in music a language capable of expressing our most varied emotions: vital energy, interrogation, anxiety, mourning, rage, hope, prayer, love, gratitude. Trois études après Kandinsky for piano, Esprit tendre for oboe (a tribute to Helen and Elliott Carter), the Sonata for solo violin in four movements, a Suite for cello, five Formants for solo clarinet, and La Prière de l’Ange gardien for solo horn make up this program, which is performed by some of the finest soloists on the current French scene.
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François-Frédéric Guy – En Pièces: Music by Marc Monnet (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:12:44 minutes | 1,07 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Odradek Records
Marc Monnet’s extraordinary musical life has been auspicious from the start: he studied with Kagel and Stockhausen in Cologne, gained attention at the Darmstadt summer school and was awarded a residency at the Villa Medici. The first book of En pièces (2007) is dedicated to François-Frédéric Guy, who premiered the entire collection at the Strasbourg Musica Festival in 2012. A long artistic companionship and a real friendship bind these two artists. François-Frédéric Guy has praised Monnet’s dazzling ability “to push piano techniques to their extreme”, as well as his “freedom of tone”, and his “Schumannian” inspiration in music of “whimsical, even fantastic, and unclassifiable character”.
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François-Frédéric Guy – Brahms: Complete Piano Sonatas (5.1 Edition) (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:35:44 minutes | 5,72 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Evidence
Brahms is one of François-Frederic Guy’s favourite composer, he has accompanied him all his life, the first work that he performed in public was his First Concerto. The Brahms Project is, above all, conceived as an amorous dictionary of the composer and not an exhaustive complete recording. It is organised around the piano, the veritable common denominator of an original itinerary combining chamber music, the Lied, the concertos and solo piano works. It proposes to take the listener on a journey to the heart of German Romanticism. Far from being presented as distinct bodies covering his entire creative life like Beethoven, Brahms’s works with piano turn from sonatas into ballads, from variations into Klavierstücke, and include trios, quartets, quintet and concertos in keeping with his evolution, with form adapting to the novelty and richness of his intoxicating melodic inspiration. This seeming disparity is found in the works’ dimensions. The three great, formidable sonatas, along with the two piano concertos are imposing monuments, whereas the Klavierstücke of the last period are presented as confidences, not to say intimate confessions. This piano, in turn abrupt and lilting, melodic and symphonic, is of such boldness and originality that it led Robert Schumann, upon hearing the first sketches of Brahms’s sonatas, to hail ‘the new prophet of German music!’
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François-Frédéric Guy – Brahms: Complete Piano Sonatas (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:35:44 minutes | 774 MB | Genre: Classical, Romantic Era, Piano
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Evidence
Brahms is one of François-Frederic Guy’s favourite composer, he has accompanied him all his life, the first work that he performed in public was his First Concerto. The Brahms Project is, above all, conceived as an amorous dictionary of the composer and not an exhaustive complete recording. It is organised around the piano, the veritable common denominator of an original itinerary combining chamber music, the Lied, the concertos and solo piano works. It proposes to take the listener on a journey to the heart of German Romanticism. Far from being presented as distinct bodies covering his entire creative life like Beethoven, Brahms’s works with piano turn from sonatas into ballads, from variations into Klavierstücke, and include trios, quartets, quintet and concertos in keeping with his evolution, with form adapting to the novelty and richness of his intoxicating melodic inspiration. This seeming disparity is found in the works’ dimensions. The three great, formidable sonatas, along with the two piano concertos are imposing monuments, whereas the Klavierstücke of the last period are presented as confidences, not to say intimate confessions. This piano, in turn abrupt and lilting, melodic and symphonic, is of such boldness and originality that it led Robert Schumann, upon hearing the first sketches of Brahms’s sonatas, to hail ‘the new prophet of German music!’
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Françoise Hardy – Personne d’autre (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 39:25 minutes | 775 MB | Genre: Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone (France)
Françoise Hardy has been absent from recording for six years. While that’s not unusual for her — she’d gone eight years between albums during her 57-year career — the circumstances surrounding that absence directly shine a light on Personne d’Autre (Nobody Else), her 24th studio album. Hardy was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer a few years before 2012’s L’Amour Fou. The process of cutting a record while going through cyclical chemo treatments was exhausting. She’d decided it was her final outing. The cancer never really went into remission during those years, and Hardy eventually became so ill, she lapsed into a coma for eight long days in 2015. But she rallied. She’d completely lost her singing voice, but she was alive and determined to fight back.
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Françoise Hardy – Message personnel (1973/2013)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 27:53 minutes | 641 MB | Genre: Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner (France)
French chanteuse Francoise Hardy was riding high in her popularity when this set was issued in 1975, made up of tracks from 1973 and 1974 as well. The overall feeling of Message Personnel is cinematic. There are the sweeping string arrangements of the legendary Michel Bernholc on all but one track. His direction of a basic rock band backed by a lush set of strings underlined Hardy’s wispy yet compelling vocals. On the single, however, “L’Amour En Privè,” Serge Gainsbourg handled production chores with musical directors J.C. Vannier and Georges Moustaki. Electric guitars roll under a sputtering beat before giving way to a shimmering sexy cabaret song that is all joie de vivre and no drama. Moustaki’s rock & roll guitars duel the Vannier’s high-end strings, which sweep across the mix, for dominance between Gainsbourg’s verses. This is also the title track to the Gainsbourg film of the same name. The set ends with “Je Suis Moi,” a dramatic rock ballad in the most theatrical sense. Indeed, had it been written and recorded five years later, it would have been conceivable for Meatloaf and Jim Steinman to record it! Message Personnel is a fine example of Hardy at the height of her powers as an interpreter, writer, and singer of songs deeply engrained in the French pop culture vernacular.
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Françoise Hardy – Ma jeunesse fout le camp (Remastered 2016) (1967/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 31:20 minutes | 671 MB | Genre: Pop
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone (France)
“Ma jeunesse fout le camp…” is a studio album by the French popular singer Françoise Hardy. Released in France in November 1967. The title is very idiomatic, but it in English its general meaning is “My youth is slipping away”. This album was the first produced by Hardy’s own production company, Asparagus Productions.
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Françoise Hardy – If You Listen (1972/2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 37:19 minutes | 421 MB | Genre: Pop, Vocal, Chanson
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Parlophone (France)
Sung (except for one track) in English, this 1972 album (originally titled just Françoise Hardy) was reissued on CD by Virgin France in 2000 under the title If You Listen, and issued in some foreign territories under yet different titles in the 1970s. However it was titled, it was a good, tasteful, and subdued set of folk-rock- and singer/songwriter-influenced covers (though the one French song, “Brulure,” was the sole original Hardy composition). It’s no surprise that the mood here is dignified rainy-day sorrow. But that was Hardy’s forte, and the arrangements, emphasizing acoustic guitar and light strings, seem to indicate she was doing some listening to British folk-rock and American singer/songwriters. So does the choice of covers, including songs by Buffy Sainte-Marie, Neil Young (“Till the Morning Comes”), Beverley Martyn, and Randy Newman (“I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”). There’s also the quite obscure “The Garden of Jane Delawnay,” a misspelled interpretation of “The Garden of Jane Delawney” by the British folk-rock band the Trees; “Let My Name Be Sorrow,” originally done by Mary Hopkin; and a couple of tunes co-written by Mick Jones, later of Foreigner. None of songs rate among her best work, but it’s still a good album, often overlooked even by Hardy fans and notable in that just one of the English songs (“Bown Bown Bown”) was also recorded by Hardy in a French version. It’s also much superior to her album of English cover versions of just three years before, Françoise Hardy en Anglais, which was over-produced and far heavier on the syrup.
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