SKU: CY.CC2608

Lalo was born in Lille (Nord), in northernmost France. He attended that city's music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berlioz's old enemy François Antoine Habeneck. For several years, he worked as a string player and teacher in Paris. In 1848, he joined with friends to found the Armingaud Quartet, playing viola and second violin. Lalo's earliest surviving compositions are songs and chamber works. He dedicated most of his career to the composition of chamber music, which was in vogue, and to writing works for orchestra.
These two works beautifully arranged by Mr. Sauder show the core of Lalo's chamber music; personal, subtle at times and filled with a French lyricism.
For advanced performers.

SKU: CY.CC2722

The Chants du Rhin (Songs of the Rhine), a cycle of six pieces, based on poems by Joseph Mery, were written in 1865, and Bizet performed two of them on 16 April 1866 at a soiree of the Beaujolais Philharmonic Society. The songs are grouped symmetrically around La bohemienne as the central piece, framed by two meditatively yearning pieces (in E and D flat major) and two vividly exuberant ones (similarly in E and D flat major), with L'aurore serving as an introduction.

In this cycle Bizet takes up the theme of the gypsy girl which had already entered European music in the operas The Bohemian Girl by the Irish composer Michael William Balfe and Verdi's Il trovatore, as well as in Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano. Bizet will return to it one year later in La jolie fille de Perth and ten years later in Carmen. The fourth piece Les confidences shows similarities in tonality, structure and motifs to the middle part of the third movement of Chopin's Sonata in B minor.

This version includes parts in B-flat treble clef as well as bass clef.