Véronique Gens, Münchner Rundfunkorchester & Hervé Niquet – Paysage (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 56:22 minutes | 1011 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
In this recital, Véronique Gens and Hervé Niquet bring back to life a neglected aspect of France’s Romantic heritage: songs with orchestral accompaniment. Aside from a few pieces by Debussy and Duparc, and Berlioz’s famous Nuits d’été, orchestral mélodies form a virtually forgotten continent. In collaboration with the specialists of the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Alpha Classics now revisits these musical landscapes, taking us from Brittany (Hahn) to Persia, whose beauties Fauré and Saint-Saëns exalt in very different ways. Mélodies by Chausson, Gounod and Dubois and rarely heard instrumental pieces by Massenet, Fauré and Fernand de La Tombelle round out the journey with their musical reveries.
Read more![Tassis Christoyannis, Véronique Gens, Jeff Cohen - César Franck: Complete Songs and Duets (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/04/17/b5j8jw2lxghgb_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Tassis Christoyannis, Véronique Gens, Jeff Cohen – César Franck: Complete Songs and Duets (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:44:16 minutes | 1,88 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Bru Zane
The alluring voices of Tassis Christoyannis and Véronique Gens immerse the listener in the atmosphere of the nineteenth-century Parisian salons and the mélodies performed there. The composer and organist César Franck, famed for his instrumental music, proves himself equally skilled in setting poems by Musset, Hugo, Chateaubriand, Daudet and Dumas. This first complete recording of his works for voice and piano ranges over his entire creative life.
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Véronique Gens, Orchestre National de Lille & Alexandre Bloch – Poulenc: La voix humaine (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:45 minutes | 1,24 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Véronique Gens’s version of La Voix humaine has been eagerly awaited! This ‘lyric tragedy in one act’ might have been written for her, so ideally suited are her feeling for language and her dramatic intensity to Poulenc’s monologue on a text by Jean Cocteau, composed in 1958. This is a far cry from the ‘light’ Poulenc of the 1920s. Cocteau paid him the highest compliment: ‘Dear Francis, you have fixed, once and for all, the way to speak my text.’
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Véronique Gens, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Hervé Niquet – Visions (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 55:41 minutes | 936 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
After an album of French songs (Néère) that earned her a “Gramophone Award” in 2016, Véronique Gens presents her new recital, this time with orchestra, which gives her an opportunity to display the maturity of her ‘Falcon’ soprano, the central tessitura typical of French Romantic opera, which takes its name from Cornélie Falcon, who created the works of Meyerbeer and Halévy staged in the 1830s. She pays tribute here to a number of composers whose unknown operas she was the first to reveal in projects mounted by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, including David, Godard, Saint-Saëns and Halévy. The programme selects arias from all the genres in vogue in the Romantic era: opera (Saint-Saëns, Halévy, Godard, Février), opéra-comique (David), oratorio (Franck, Massenet) and the cantata for the Prix de Rome (Bizet, Bruneau). A nod to Wagner and his Tannhäuser – in its French translation of the 1860s – completes this programme conducted by a longstanding colleague of the soprano, one of the leading specialists in French music, Hervé Niquet.
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Véronique Gens, Marie-Adeline Henry, Frédéric Antoun, Andrew Foster-Williams, Jean Teitgen, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Ulf Schirmer – Saint-Saëns: Proserpine (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:34:40 minutes | 958 MB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Bru Zane
The protagonist of Saint-Saëns’ Proserpine, premiered at the Opéra-Comique on 14 March 1887, is no reincarnation of the ancient goddess, but a Renaissance courtesan well versed in culpable amours. According to the composer, she is ‘a damned soul for whom true love is a forbidden fruit; as soon as she approaches it, she experiences torture’. Yet for all the innocence of her rival Angiola, the unexpected happens: ‘It is the bloodthirsty beast that is admirable; the sweet creature is no more than pretty and likeable.’ Visibly enraptured by this delight in horror, Saint-Saëns indulges in unprecedented orchestral modernity, piling on the dissonances beneath his characters’ cries of rage or despair. He concluded thus: ‘Proserpine is, of all my stage works, the most advanced in the Wagnerian system.’ The least-known, too, and one which it was high time to reveal to the public, in its second version, revised in 1899.
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Véronique Gens, I Giardini – Nuits (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:39 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
As the symbiosis between the art of the poet and that of the composer, the French mélodie became the jewel of the salons of the ‘Belle Époque’. By placing a string quartet and a piano around the singer, Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, Lekeu’s Nocturne and Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson oscillate between chamber musical intimacy and orchestral ambition. Alongside these famous pioneering pieces, this programme devised by the Palazzetto Bru Zane champions a return to the art of transcription, so popular in the nineteenth century, with the aim of expanding the repertory for voice, strings and piano in order to unearth some forgotten treasures. Hence Hahn, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, La Tombelle, Ropartz, Louiguy and Messager all appear in a programme whose guiding thread is the emotions of nocturnal abandonment: the charms of twilight, the trajectory of dreams, the terror of nightmare or the exhilaration of festive occasions. Alexandre Dratwicki has made these arrangements in the style of the nineteenth century. Appropriately enough, the programme ends with La Vie en rose, for this music offers a kaleidoscope of all the colours of human feeling. The texture of solo strings and piano sets Véronique Gens’s incomparable storytelling artistry in a new ligh.
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Véronique Gens, Ensemble Les Surprises & Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas – Lully, Charpentier & Desmarets: Passion (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:10 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
This programme marks the eagerly awaited return of V’eronique Gens to Baroque music and Lully, in which she made a name for herself at the start of her career. It presents airs from Atys, Pers’ee, Alceste, Proserpine, Le Triomphe de l’Amour and other works by Louis XIV’s famous composer, but also several by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (M’ed’ee), Henry Desmarets and Pascal Collasse.
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Véronique Gens – Chausson: Poème de l’amour et de la mer & Symphonie Op. 20 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:05 minutes | 1,04 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Ernest Chausson is a most unusual figure in French music, positioned at the crossroads where the romanticism of Berlioz and Franck meet the language of Wagner and the symbolism of the young Debussy. His Poème de l’amour et de la mer is a unique score for the period and certainly his greatest work; simultaneously a profane, naturistic cantata, a monologue, and a song cycle, it was composed between 1882 and 1892. Véronique Gens is recording this cycle for the first time, although she has already issued Le temps des lilas with Susan Manoff at the piano (“Néère”), about which Ernst Van Bek wrote in Classiquenews: « it mesmerises with the nuancing of its colours, the allusive precision of every sung word ».
Véronique Gens’ talent is equally on display in this recording too, with the Orchestre National de Lille – an orchestra she already knows well – under Alexandre Bloch, its new chief conductor, whose appointment and first concerts and recordings have already caused a sensation… The Symphony in B-flat major completes this programme: a summit of French symphonic writing, for some a milestone as important as the Symphony in D of Chausson’s teacher César Franck!
Read more![Véronique Gens, Sandrine Piau, Julien Chauvin - Rivales (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/05/01/csclml5dg8nxc_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Véronique Gens, Sandrine Piau, Julien Chauvin – Rivales (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:10 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics
Sandrine Piau and Véronique Gens have a longstanding rapport and dreamed of making a recording together. Here they pay tribute to two singers who, like them, were born within a year of each other, Mme Dugazon (1755-1821) and Mme Saint-Huberty (1756-1812): both enjoyed triumphant careers in Paris, inspiring numerous librettists and composers. Gluck even nicknamed Saint-Huberty “Madame-la-Ressource”, while “a Dugazon” became a generic name for the roles of naïve girls in love, and later of comical mothers.
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![Véronique Gens, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, John Axelrod - Hector Berlioz: Herminie - Nuits d'été / Maurice Ravel: Schéhérazade (2012) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz] Download](https://i0.wp.com/imghd.xyz/images/2022/09/01/0761195120026_600.jpg?resize=500%2C500&ssl=1)
Véronique Gens, Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, John Axelrod – Hector Berlioz: Herminie – Nuits d’été / Maurice Ravel: Schéhérazade (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:05:29 minutes | 568 MB | Genre: Classiсal
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Ondine
On this release famous soprano Véronique Gens performs Herminie and Les Nuits d’été by Hector Berlioz and Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the baton of its music director John Axelrod.
Véronique Gens is internationally recognised as one of the greatest sopranos. She has made a big career with baroque repertoire and Mozart, but French repertoire, especially Berlioz and Ravel, are “as natural to her as the air that she breathes”. Her French remains a model of immaculate diction, fluid and luminous.
Having a very special relationship to Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été and Herminie, Véronique Gens combines them on this release with Shéhérazade by Ravel, which conjures up a totally different world. On this CD Herminie is released the first time with Véronique Gens.
The charismatic conductor John Axelrod is music director of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire since 2009, following the philosophy of being “open to the world” by extraordinarily diverse repertoire choices and innovative programming. Also internationally he is a sought after conductor both for concerts and opera productions.
Founded in 1971, the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, a “national” orchestra since 1996, is based in two cities, in Angers and Nantes. Today about 200 concerts attract yearly about 200,000 listeners, among them more than 10,000 subscribers.
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