Tout en douceur... Gabriel Fauré

Do NOT tell me you didn't listen to the St. Matthew Passion I told you about a couple of weeks ago (as an alternative to the abysmal production of Aida)! Whether you're religious or not, a refined beauty of this music cannot leave you unmoved. Berlioz said: "Bach, c’est Bach, comme Dieu c’est Dieu."

I am normally not crazy about sacred music but recently, for whatever the reason, I found myself very often listening to Fauré's Requiem. I guess I got soothed in by the first track on my CD, which is Pavane, and then the Requiem unfolds pleasantly. So here is Pavane to make your day nice and easy:



and then two excerpts from the performance at La Salle Pleyel, earlier this year, by Orchestre de Paris under Paavo Järvi (Matthias Goerne is singing)

Bonne chance maestro Järvi!

Paavo Järvi is a very good conductor who these days officially became the new music director of Orchestre de Paris. The inaugural concert at Pleyel will take place tonight [Wednesday, Sept. 15 @ 8 p.m. (CET)]. I have a ticket and I'll go but you (all of you!) can come with me too --if you want-- thanks to Arte Live Web. You can either follow this link or see the concert tonight in a video embedded below [at the end of this entry].

The program is available here.
Järvi evidently opted to present himself with a Nordic sound of Jean Sibelius [close to his native Estonia], and combine it with a fitting French sound which appears to be La Péri by Paul Dukas.
Two Finnish soloists will be singing: Soile Isokoski and our fave Juha Uusitalo.

Paavo Järvi

Orchestre de Paris is a strange bunch: they are like a treasury of top class musicians, but together they rarely perform at the level you'd expect them to. Last time I listened them reaching the level of any Top-10 world orchestra was at Pleyel, in a performance of the Britten's War Requiem, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. That was a good illustration that they could be great and that a chemistry between them and their previous director, Christoph Eschenbach was lacking. Let's hope Järvi will be able to make the best of the orchestra's potential and help them regain the Top-10 level they deserve. 
Good luck maestro!

Thanks to ArteLiveWeb...

I skipped the recital of Felicity Lott & Ann Murray in Musée d'Orsay in Paris because there were so many opera to see. Arte Live Web comes into help. They recorded the evening and made it available to all of us on this link (including all of you outside France and Germany)

If you like the songs by Schumann, Brahms, Britten, Poulenc, Porter, Barber, Fauré, Hahn, Saint-Saëns, Lehrer, Rodgers,  Lehmann, or Cole Porter (!), you can enjoy 80 minutes of cool singing by 2 dive who have all the experience needed to sing this repertoire (second part of the concert is particularly good!):



Moreover...