New French Song Twenty new settings of French words by
British composers |
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Tarik
O’Regan ~ Sainte |
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Settings of
Guillaume
Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Yves Bonnefoy, |
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"Alison Smart ... elicited a really impressive range of colours and contours, comfortably handling the stylistic changes between songs." "With a remarkable sensitivity and wide palette of colours, Katharine Durran’s playing was a musical lesson in Art history." Magnus
Carey For full reviews of the CD and première performance Click here |
New French Song has created a whole new repertoire of songs by British composers. The project was conceived in 1999, when soprano Alison Smart and pianist Katharine Durran were giving recitals marking the centenary of Poulenc's birth and celebrating the songs of Fauré. They commissioned twenty exceptional British composers, some of whom were well established, others of whom were yet to receive the recognition they deserve. The composers were asked to set French literature of their choice from the past two hundred years. The texts, ranging from Victor Hugo to the new millennium, were chosen by the composers in consultation with Alison Smart and Katharine Durran, and form a wonderful springboard for the composers' individual expression The result is a fascinating rainbow work covering all the major literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overlapping into the twenty-first century – Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, Modernism and post-Modernism The
twenty songs were written in 2003 and 2004. Alison Smart and Katharine
Durran premièred them on New
French Song
forms a substantial contribution to the art song repertoire, and
demonstrates a rare and far-reaching artistic vision.
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BBC
Singer ALISON SMART specialises |