Réminicenses

Choc Classica *****
Echo Klassik Preis

Our disc offers an overview of late nineteenth-century French Romanticism in all its ambiguities. One finds in French composers a type of immediate seduction that seems to be less of a primary concern in German music.

Saint-Saëns is for me the great master of the charming piece that possesses a certain ‘superficial’ beauty – in the best sense of that adjective; it’s music that casts a spell. Franck gives us a mixture of the French and Austro-German worlds, very different in character from Saint- Saëns. All of this existed at the same time, which goes to show the richness of the fin de siècle era.

— Julien Libeer, from the liner notes

‘The amount of passionate, as well as intuitively dosed musicality flowing from these performances almost takes your breath away. Camille Thomas and Julien Libeer create an ideal balance throughout the entire discours.’

— Opus Klassiek