Organization

Soprano (+2)

Sandrine Piau

Soprano

La Monnaie/De Munt

Orchestra

Ensemble Contraste

La Monnaie

The sun shining in Richard Strauss’s Tomorrow and the twilight of his Four Last Songs. The enigmatic and sensual La Flûte enchantée from Maurice Ravel’s Shéhérazade. A dive into the forest with Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Waldgespräch and Ernest Chausson's Le Colibri, as well as pieces by Johannes Brahms, Ernst Bloch and Louis Spohr...

After performing in our Requiem, soprano and harpist Sandrine Piau is returning to La Monnaie for a recital dedicated to a personal obsession of hers: the conflict between light and darkness. Accompanied by the Ensemble Contraste, she has an evening of mystery, nature and poetry for you, bringing together touching and contrasting mélodies.

Sandrine Piau & Ensemble Contraste: Clair-Obscur

Brussels

Belgium

Sandrine Piau & Ensemble Contraste: Clair-Obscur: Recital Various

Vocal / Song cycle

Recital

‘The dreamer! That double of our existence, that chiaroscuro of the thinking being’, wrote Gaston Bachelard in 1961. ‘The old is dying, the new cannot be born, and in that chiaroscuro, monsters appear’, adds Antonio Gramsci. Sandrine Piau has chosen to use these two quotations as an epigraph to her new recording: ‘My family and friends know about this obsession that never leaves me completely. The antagonism between light and darkness. The chiaroscuro, the space in between . . .’ This programme, recorded with the Orchestre Victor Hugo under its conductor Jean-François Verdier, who is also principal clarinettist of the Paris Opéra, travels between the chilly Rhenish forest of Waldgespräch, a ballad by Zemlinsky composed for soprano and small ensemble in 1895, the night of the first of Berg’s Seven Early Songs (1905-08), and the sunlight of Richard Strauss’s Morgen, which are followed by the Four Last Songs, composed in 1948, the first two of which, Frühling and September (evoking spring and autumn respectively) are also, as Sandrine Piau concludes, ‘the seasons of life’.

Approved

Production booklet

Further reading