La Soiree

SKU: CA.926400

ISBN 9790007261870. French. Text: Victor Hugo.

In his poem Soiree en mer, Victor Hugo describes how the sea can be perceived very differently by two lovers at the same time in the same place. While the man perceives the deepening shadows on the dancing waves, the woman marvels at the stars shining ever brighter in the firmament. In nature, as in the words of the poem, the painful ambiguity that represents life at its core can be experienced. Like no other poet, Hugo captures this almost unbearable simultaneity of living and dying, of love and suffering. Saint-Saens translates this into music - probably the most ephemeral and contemporary of all art forms. His balanced musical form leaves plenty of room for the poetry and his subtle variations in timbre, which also inspired Denis Rouger to his choral arrangement, create a seething motion under the surface of the sea.

This art song was originally composed not for chamber choir, but for solo voice and piano. Denis Rouger has carefully adapted it to suit the requirements and expressive possibilities offered by a larger ensemble, without losing any of the qualities of the original in the process. Each part in the choir has a melodic line drawn from the harmonic and rhythmic framework. In the process, the variety and refinement of the choral language combines with an enormous flexibility in form and expression, as French melodies or German art song demand from a soloist and pianist. The songs have been recorded by the figure humaine chamber choir on the CD ...wo die Ztronen bluhn (Carus 83.514).

SKU: CY.CC2718

The Chants du Rhin (Songs of the Rhine), a cycle of six pieces, based on poems by Joseph Mery, were written in 1865, and Bizet performed two of them on 16 April 1866 at a soiree of the Beaujolais Philharmonic Society. The songs are grouped symmetrically around La bohemienne as the central piece, framed by two meditatively yearning pieces (in E and D flat major) and two vividly exuberant ones (similarly in E and D flat major), with L'aurore serving as an introduction.

In this cycle Bizet takes up the theme of the gypsy girl which had already entered European music in the operas The Bohemian Girl by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe and Verdi's Il trovatore, as well as in Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano. Bizet will return to it one year later in La jolie fille de Perth and ten years later in Carmen. The fourth piece Les confidences shows similarities in tonality, structure and motifs to the middle part of the third movement of Chopin's Sonata in B minor.

SKU: ND.RPHR439-SET