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Adèle Hugo: Mélodies sur des poèmes de Victor Hugo

Karine Deshayes (soloist), Sandrine Piau (soloist), Isabelle Druet (soloist), Anaïde Apelian, Laurianne Corneille, Axelle Fanyo (soloist), Thomas Saulet, Anaïs Constans (soloist), Laurent Naouri (soloist), Sophie Paul-Magnien, Orchestre Victor Hugo, Chœur de l'Opéra de Dijon, Jean-François Verdier

Adèle Hugo: Mélodies sur des poèmes de Victor Hugo
The pieces show Adèle’s flair for melodic invention and bear the influence of the Hugos’ musical acquaintances. Traces of Liszt, Berlioz and Bertin are clearly audible...Top-rate singers, led...

Adèle Hugo: Mélodies sur des poèmes de Victor Hugo

Karine Deshayes (soloist), Sandrine Piau (soloist), Isabelle Druet (soloist), Anaïde Apelian, Laurianne Corneille, Axelle Fanyo (soloist), Thomas Saulet, Anaïs Constans (soloist), Laurent Naouri (soloist), Sophie Paul-Magnien, Orchestre Victor Hugo, Chœur de l'Opéra de Dijon, Jean-François Verdier

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The pieces show Adèle’s flair for melodic invention and bear the influence of the Hugos’ musical acquaintances. Traces of Liszt, Berlioz and Bertin are clearly audible...Top-rate singers, led...

About

This album pays homage to the composer Adele Hugo (1830-1915), the fifth child of the great poet Victor Hugo. Suffering from lifelong psychological instability, she spent half of her tragic life in mental institutions, from the age of 42 until her death aged 85. Hers was an exalted and sensitive temperament; she became passionately fond of music from an early age, studying the piano and then composition. Her musical manuscripts were recently rediscovered, and the Director of the Victor Hugo Museums in Paris and Guernsey entrusted them to composer Richard Dubugnon, so as to research and reconstruct the jigsaw of these often quite fragmentary scores, which had been lying forgotten for more than a century. What has emerged is a set of fourteen of her songs on poems by Victor Hugo and verses taken from his great novel Les Miserables, as well as five songs without words. Appropriately, the Orchestre Victor Hugo and its Music Director Jean-Francois Verdier have been involved in the project, and they invited Dubugnon to orchestrate the pieces, presented here by a multi-generational team of leading singers.

Contents and tracklist

No. 1 (Arr. for Orchestra and Soprano by Richard Dubugnon)
Track length2:57
No. 2 (Arr. for Orchestra and Soprano by Richard Dubugnon)
Track length3:30
No. 3 (Arr. for Orchestra and Soprano by Richard Dubugnon)
Track length1:47

Awards and reviews

January 2025

The pieces show Adèle’s flair for melodic invention and bear the influence of the Hugos’ musical acquaintances. Traces of Liszt, Berlioz and Bertin are clearly audible...Top-rate singers, led by Anaïs Constans and Axelle Fanyo give deeply expressive performances, perfectly enunciating every syllable.

January 2025

The vocal line-up is classy...Best of all is Axelle Fanyo, passionate and declamatory throughout, so that the greatness of the poetry itself really hits home.

21st November 2024

The composer Richard Dubugnon has orchestrated 14 of her songs, and his instrumentations lend an idiomatic, sometimes colourful, often mellow slant to some appealing melodies.
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