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Idylle
Lea Desandre (mezzo), Thomas Dunford (theorbo)
Awards:
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Presto Editor's Choice, October 2023
Spanning four centuries, this gorgeous recital from a couple who were brought together through a mutual love of French Baroque is absolutely hypnotic stuff...Desandre's limpid, flexible mezzo...
Idylle
Lea Desandre (mezzo), Thomas Dunford (theorbo)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Presto Editor's Choice, October 2023
Spanning four centuries, this gorgeous recital from a couple who were brought together through a mutual love of French Baroque is absolutely hypnotic stuff...Desandre's limpid, flexible mezzo...
About
French love songs from three centuries, interspersed with reflective lute solos, constitute an Idylle for mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford. As they explain: “The emotions of love are explored in different forms – languor, desire, fascination, happiness.” The word ‘idyll’, evoking a blissful, tranquil experience, derives from Ancient Greece and poetry on a pastoral theme. Desandre and Dunford spin a thematic and musical thread between eras and styles, starting with a sequence of 10 airs de cour from the 17th century. Spanning the era from the 1860s to the 1920s are arias and songs by Offenbach, Debussy, Hahn and Messager, and the album then fast-forwards to the 1960s and two iconic French chanteuses, Barbara and Françoise Hardy. Dunford supplies instrumental interludes in the form of two dances by Robert de Visée, a court musician for both Louis XIV and Louis XV, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1 and Gnossienne No 1.
Contents and tracklist
Spotlight on this release
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Thomas Dunford and Lea Desandre on Songs of Passion
The lutenist and mezzo discuss their Presto Award-winning album of music by Dowland and Purcell, their own first encounters with both composers as teenagers, and some of the friends and family-members who played a part in the project.
Awards and reviews
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Presto Editor's ChoiceOctober 2023
October 2023
Spanning four centuries, this gorgeous recital from a couple who were brought together through a mutual love of French Baroque is absolutely hypnotic stuff...Desandre's limpid, flexible mezzo works beautifully against the delicacy of the theorbo, and Dunford's Satie transcriptions are mesmerising.
The New York Times 26th October 2023
Relentlessly beautiful, extremely French, and restricted to the sounds of voice and lute, the program can feel flattened, yet you’d be hard-pressed to resist its sexy allure and intimacy.
