For as long as I can remember, I have loved and admired France, and especially the city of Paris – ever since my first visit as a young boy: I was captivated by the powerful charm of the country to the point of falling in love with it and later settling there. And today, after living there for over a decade, I still feel the same sense of wonder for this city. In this album, I pay homage to my two homelands with a selection of pieces and songs that grasp the essence of the 20th century, from the period between the two wars and in the 1950's.

A few years after the success of her album crossing Baroque music with folk, Love I Obey (ALPHA538), the Franco-American singer Rosemary Standley visits Schubert, this time with the complicity of the Ensemble Contraste: ‘We all have a few notes of Schubert buried deep inside us’ say the artists, who have got together around his music and brought to it an original sound texture, the result of their varied influences – classical, pop, jazz, folk.

Ernest Bloch’s Suite Hébraïque was the starting point for this programme: ‘This music came as a revelation to us. Its language is overwhelming and tells of the ravages of the twentieth century. The other composers in this programme (Ravel, Bloch, Bruch, Prokofiev, Shostakovich) each in their own way experienced the full force of this tormented century and drew inspiration from the most timeless and universal aspects of folk and sacred repertories, the better to respond to the brutality of the age’, say violist Arnaud Thorette and pianist Johan Farjot, who devised this programme. Johan Farjot has also arranged John Williams’s famous Schindler’s List theme for viola and cello. An intense and poignant experience, also featuring other superb artists: Antoine Pierlot (cello), Pierre Génisson (clarinet), Karine Deshayes (mezzo-soprano), and Sarah and Deborah Nemtanu (violin).

Gabriel Fauré originally wrote his song cycle, La Bonne chanson, for voice and piano, but a few years after its 1894 premiere he created a version with string quintet and piano. He later questioned the wisdom of having made the arrangement, thinking perhaps he was gilding the lily by adding even more sumptuous timbral richness to a work that was already so melodically and harmonically sensuous. Few listeners are likely to complain about his arrangement, though, particularly when it is performed as well as it is here, with mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes and members of Ensemble Contraste. Deshayes has a relatively light lyric voice that still has enough fullness to put across the romantic ardor of the music and the poetry.