Maxime Pascal

Le Balcon, Maxime Pascal – Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:02:59 minutes | 667 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © B Records

The Song of the Earth is Gustav Mahler’s most personal composition, as the composer himself revealed. It takes on all it’s twilight hues with Stéphane Degout’s vocal performance. Ardently conducted by Maxime Pascal, Le Balcon delivers a performance which sets the standard, using Arnold Schönberg’s pared-down transcription in the royal acoustic setting of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Le Balcon and the Saint-Denis Festival have a long history, which began in 2014 with a recital by the soprano Julie Fuchs in the Music Pavilion of the Maison Education de la Légion d’honneur. Since then, all Le Balcon’s concerts given in the Basilica of Saint-Denis have left their mark on our respective histories: whether it be Monteverdi’s Vespers in 2015 (with a sound system and an electric guitar in the orchestra, a historic first for this repertoire), the final scene of Stockhausen’s Samstag aus Licht in 2016 (impressively rigorous, it literally transfixed the audience) or Mahler’s seventh symphony in 2017. Freedom, innovation, creativity but total respect for the works and composers are the words that immediately come to mind when thinking of Le Balcon, whose collective ad-venture is the basis of a faultless career.
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Le Balcon, Maxime Pascal – Weill, Brecht & Hauptmann: L’opéra de quat’sous (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:28:22 minutes | 1,36 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

This album presents the songs from The Threepenny Opera in a new French translation by Alexandre Pateau. The recording was made at the 2023 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence during the run of the new production of the legendary work by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, which features the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise and the musicians of Le Balcon, conducted by Maxime Pascal with Thomas Ostermeier as stage director. In this parody of an opera, the songs are the driving force behind the action and the characters ape the bourgeois lifestyle of the audience, the better to denounce the period of moral confusion they are going through. With Maxime Pascal at the helm of a dozen multi-instrumentalists from Le Balcon, we hear a version based on that of the first performance – hard-hitting and as close as possible to the tremendous creative energy deployed by the two creators of the work in the summer of 1928 – acted and sung by the troupe of the Comedie-Francaise, who rise to all its challenges with brio. Other special features of this album are a previously unrecorded song on a text by Yvette Guilbert and the linking texts between the songs read in French by Ostermeier himself. As Diapason wrote of this production, ‘Almost a century after its premiere, The Threepenny Opera has lost none of its subversive power.’

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