Amuse-Bouche: French Choral Delicacies | Decca 4789394

Amuse-Bouche: French Choral Delicacies

Label: Decca

Cat No: 4789394

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 1st April 2016

Contents

About

Award-winning vocal group I Fagiolini celebrate their 30th anniversary with a new release, Amuse-Bouche, offering a rich concoction of 20th-century choral delicacies and marking a departure from their previous recordings of Italian Renaissance music.

Arranged as a tasting menu, this new Decca Classics recording includes two world premieres bursting with Gallic flavour. 

Chief among them is the world premiere recording of a humorous and erotically charged hommage to French cuisine by Jean Françaix. His Ode à la Gastronomie is an affectionate parody of sage advice from the great 19th-century guide to French food and dining, La Physiologie du goût, by Brillat-Savarin. Composed in 1953 but never since performed or recorded, Françaix’s set of songs is best described as “‘9½ Weeks’ meets Jacques Brel meets Raymond Blanc.” 

Alongside Françaix’s complex concoction is Cantique des Cantiques by Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, composed within two years of the Françaix piece. It portrays the erotically charged Biblical Song of Songs as a dialogue between Christ and the Church.
 
These large-scale works are separated by a collection of smaller pieces designed as a series of “amuse-bouches” in between the main courses, including a nod to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Erik Satie as pianist Anna Markland plays three of Satie’s six gentle Gnossiennes.

Reviews

Sensuality doesn’t so much ooze as burst in ecstatic, convulsive spasms from I Fagiolini’s latest recording. If it weren’t for the imagination of the programming and the bold, cheeky intelligence that guides the choice and juxtaposition of repertoire, then ‘Amuse-bouche’ – the group’s homage to all things French – would be frankly indecent.

As it is, the collection is the very best kind of musical pleasure, and one rather more substantial and enduring than the title might suggest. Robert Hollingworth and his singers roam widely across 20th-century France, through works by Poulenc, Ravel, Satie and Milhaud, but also pausing at two larger works – Jean Françaix’s genre defying Ode à la gastronomie (recorded here for the first time) and Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur’s choral song cycle Le Cantique des Cantiques.

[...] ‘Amuse-bouche’ marks I Fagiolini’s 30th anniversary. It’s in keeping with Hollingworth and his agile, chameleon-like group that, instead of the inevitable greatest hits album, we get something entirely fresh and unexpected, a recording that’s a bit sexy, a bit silly and absolutely, unmissably superb.  Alexandra Coghlan
Gramophone April 2016

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