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Track(s) taken from CDA67321/2

Le temps des lilas

composer
Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
1886
author of text
Maurice Bouchor (1855-1929)

Dame Felicity Lott (soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
Recording details: November 1999
Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Antony Howell & Julian Millard
Release date: March 2001
Total duration: 4 minutes 20 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
Dame Felicity Lott (soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)

Reviews

‘Up to Hyperion's habitual high standard’ (Gramophone)

‘Felicity Lott … is radiant and unhurried and the pick of an excellent crop of singers’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘With this disc, the music of Chausson really does find revelatory new significance’ (The Times)

‘Superb. Art is long, life is short, and this offering is very, very rich’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘This is Hyperion at its best, presenting sensuous, exquisite performances … Dames Felicity Lott and Ann Murray generate magical artistry’ (Music Week)

‘Unlikely to be bettered’ (MusicWeb International)

‘To have the complete collection gathered together on disc is a treat, and with artists like these, the performances are about as good as you could expect this side of the pearly gates … if a reason for a reassessment of Chausson's role as a writer of mélodie is needed, this marvellous set is overwhelmingly it’ (Amazon.co.uk)

‘Editor, musicologist, impresario and pianist Graham Johnson gives us a jewel-box of essays, poems, time-lines, artwork, and Chausson's complete songs. And the performances are as magical and eloquent as the program book’ (Opera News)
Self-critical and pessimistic, the late nineteenth-century French composer Ernest Chausson wrote beautiful songs before his early death in a freak bicycle accident. Le temps des lilas is perhaps Chausson’s most famous song, the essence of nostalgia for all that slips away from us as time goes by. The writer Camille Mauclair once described Chausson as having the appearance of someone ‘rising from mid-dream and taking a step towards reality … he was one of those who concern themselves their entire lives with their inner existence’, and we hear in this song a pattern typical of this composer: a beginning in elegiac melancholy, anguish and turbulence in the middle section, and a return to opening strains now made even more haunting at the close.

from notes by Susan Youens © 2015

Other albums featuring this work

L'heure exquise
Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
Studio Master: CDA67962Studio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
My Garden
Dame Felicity Lott (soprano), Graham Johnson (piano)
CDA66937Download only

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