Trio Haydee - Ciels Dor [CD]

Ciels d'or ('Golden Skies') examines Light, its variations as well as its poetic power, through the work of women composers of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries: Premieres and first recordings of a powerful, poetic repertoire for a non-standard ensemble (mezzo-soprano, flute and harp). In Ciels d'or, the Trio Haydee performs a number of works recorded for the first time with this arrangement of instruments (Grandval, Viardot, Boulanger, Wertheim) or for the first time at all: To date, the pieces of Edith Lejet (winner of the Prix de Rome in 1968), Edith Canat de Chizy (of the Academie Francaise) and Elisenda Fabregas (composer in residence in Palau in Barcelone) have never been recorded. Aube ('Dawn'), commissioned by Trio Haydee from the author and illustrator Diglee and composer Josephine Stephenson, introduces us to the poetic and powerful combination of the two creators' worlds. The album also features a complete novelty - 'Pantoum' by Marguerite Roesgen-Champion - which has been neither recorded nor published before now. A 40 page booklet accompanies the CD providing a lot of information about these pieces, as well as an interview with our creators and illustrations from Diglee, drawn during the recording process. The light and the skies are ablaze at the dawn and at the end of the night, creating transitional moments that poets and composers seize upon: Rosy Wertheim and Edith Lejet write of the blazing twilight, Garcia Lorca and Elisenda Fabregas of the exacerbated sensuality of the burning sun, Edith Canat de Chizy's Litanie of spiritual light, while Diglee and Josephine Stephenson's Aube poetically touches on the memory of pale, chilling daylight. The night, at the heart of these plays of light, is sometimes nightmarish, consuming the poet in Grace Williams' Songs of Sleep, or sometimes the site of a floating dream, as in Reflets by Maeterlinck and Lili Boulanger. Its pure darkness allows Louise-Zoe Gouirand-Gentil's twinkling stars to stand out. Birds, harbingers of both night (particularly in Pauline Viardot's Roussignolet) and day, accompany these luminous crossings, these moments of mingling between night and day, then human beings allow themselves to intimately touch and be touched. These are the moments to which the birds give voice.