Machuel, Thierry - Psalm

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Long neglected in France because of the lack of qualified ensembles, the art of choral singing is at last beginning to attract musicians and composers. The present CD offers a fine example of this renaissance. It contains a selection of works by Thierry Machuel, a composer and pianist in his early forties who held successive scholarships at the prestigious Villa Medici in Rome and the Casa de Velazquez in Madrid. His output to date consists of some forty works, around three-quarters of them for a cappella choir. Machuel's art is notable above all for his remarkable sensitivity to extremely diverse poetic styles from many different horizons. Thus his cycle of Nocturnes embraces texts by both contemporary French writers and the great Bengali poet Tagore, while in Jiv he reconstructs the life of Ossip Mandelstam, a victim of Stalinist oppression. The same commitment against tyranny and for personal and poetic freedom is to be found in Dark like me, a vast fresco evoking the lives of Black Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, written in homage to Billie Holiday, and in Über dem Dorn (whose first movement, Psalm, gives the CD its title), an overwhelming exploration of the tortured universe of Paul Celan. This virtuosic, moving, invariably accessible music is performed by exemplary ensembles conducted by two major figures in the renewal of French choral singing - Laurence Equilbey, well known to all music lovers for her magnificent work with Accentus, and Geoffroy Jourdain.