The première of Daudet's play L'Arlésienne with incidental music by Bizet at the Théâtre du Vaudeville on 30 September 1872 was a devastating event for both playwright and composer and the production was removed from the repertory after 19 performances. The critic Johannès Weber however was alert to the quality of Bizet's score and suggested that the composer should excerpt and rescore several pieces for the Concerts populaires where 'the lovely music would be better appreciated than at the Vaudeville'. Bizet must have moved rather quickly to follow Weber's suggestion for the première of the first Arlésienne suitetook place only six weeks later at the Concerts populaires on 10 November 1872 and the work in its new abridged form was soon taken up by many other orchestras. Thus before his death in June 1875 Bizet had the satisfaction that his suite from L'Arlésienne was played by all the major concert societies in Paris and it has remained firmly in the concert and recorded repertoire ever since.

Par EICHBERG NILS SOREN. „Oryx and Crake“ tells the story of the only human survivor on Earth. In flash-backs, revealing only bit by bit, we must ourselves put together the pieces of the drama that lead to the apocalypse. The opera unfolds within 24 hours, beginning at dawn and finishing the next morning. Atwood’s love-triangle offers plenty of classic music drama, her dystopia is painted in complex, industrial soundscapes and the post-armageddon solitude in contemporary-contemplative open spaces. Electronics extend and augment the orchestral colours and help achieving the unreal „haunted“ atmosphere and the different reality levels of the protagonist’s memory. / Date parution : 2023-10-31/ Répertoire / Orchestre

Music Of Our Time. Par HENZE HANS WERNER. ‘My Sinfonia No. 8 is not at all tragic or moody like the Seventh. It is a summer piece and is based on three moments from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream‘, writes Hans Werner Henze. This, however, is all we get to know from the composer regarding the work’s reference to Shakespeare’s comedy. On closer examination of the three-movement symphony it turns out that the first movement is a fantasia on Oberon’s order to Puck to search for the magic flower. In the second movement, Henze apparently set the love scenes between Titania and Bottom to music. Ultimately, the final movement shines gracefully and peacefully as if everything that had happened before had only been a dream. - Hans Werner Henze/ Répertoire / Orchestre

Since the 1980s scholarly research into Reger has built up a picture of the diversity, complexity and variety of Reger's work and shown that the composer was the first to depart from the supposed logical evolution of music history. In the musical scene, on the other hand, ideas prevail that are clichéd and based on a small canon of works. This is now about to change.Since the beginning of the twenty-first century a thematic catalogue of the works of Max Reger and their sources has been put together in the Max-Reger-Institut Karlsruhe funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. This will be a fitting addition to our series of thematic catalogues of the works of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Schumann. It contains in-depth information in a readable form on the complete original works and arrangements, both published and unpublished, completed or fragmentary. Information concerning the genesis, place and state of the handwritten and printed sources are presented comprehensively and reflect the current state of research. Thus not only scholars but also performers, music lovers and concert organizers will be able to get to know Reger's neglected but in many ways surprising works.Numerous indexes will make the Reger Thematic Catalogue easy and clear to use and it has all of the prerequisites to soon become the definitive reference work for Max Reger. / Orchestre

Aside from The Barber Of Seville most of Rossini's thirty-nine operas are revived only rarely today. The overtures to his operas however are another matter entirely. Evergreen in their appeal many remain popular mainstays of orchestral repertoires worldwide loved by audiences for their elegance lively rhythms and beautiful melodies. This volume contains five of the most admired of Rossini's operatic overtures reprinted from authoritative full-score editions.