Amuse-Bouche I Fagiolini & Robert Hollingworth

• 1Pro fumo00:26
• Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Banalités, FP 107
• 2Hôtel02:02
• Jean Françaix (1912-1997): Ode à la gastronomie
• 31. La physiologie du goût07:56
• 42. Père Bernadin et la truffe noire04:51
• 53. Gastéréa, dixième des Muses04:19
• Erik Satie (1866-1925)
• 6Gnossienne No. 403:11
• Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur (1908-2002): Le Cantique des cantiques
• 71. Dialogue03:19
• 82. La voix du bien-aimé03:28
• 93. Le songe01:36
• 104. Le Roi Salomon01:31
• 115. Le jardin clos04:16
• 126. La sulamite03:19
• 137. Epithalame02:39
• Erik Satie (1866-1925)
• 14Gnossienne No.503:27
• Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Sept Chansons, FP 81
• 151. La blanche neige01:19
• 162. A peine défigurée01:28
• 173. Par une nuit nouvelle01:32
• 184. Tous les droits02:29
• 195. Belle et ressemblante01:54
• 206. Marie02:04
• 217. Luire01:58
• Erik Satie (1866-1925)
• 22Gnossienne No.602:13
• Darius Milhaud (1892-1974): Deux poèmes
• 231. Éloge V03:26
• 242. Le brick02:19
• Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Un soir de Neige, FP 126
• 251. Le feu01:04
• 262. Un loup01:27
• 273. Derniers instants01:48
• 284. Du dehors00:59
• Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Piano Concerto In G, M. 83 - Arr. Roderick Williams
• 29Adagio09:05
• Total Runtime01:21:25

Info for Amuse-Bouche

Award-winning vocal group I Fagiolini celebrates its 30th anniversary with a new release, Amuse-Bouche, offering a rich concoction of 20th Century choral delicacies and marking a departure from their previous recordings of Renaissance music. This new Decca Classics recording includes three world premieres bursting with Gallic flavour.

Chief among them is the first recording of an 18-minute humorous homage to French cuisine by Jean Françaix. His Ode à la Gastronomie is an affectionate parody of sage advice from the great 19th century guide to French food and dining, La Physiologie du gout (1825), by Brillat-Savarin.

Composed in 1950 but never since recorded since, subjects covered range from causes of indigestion to the erotic properties of the black truffle, with the music recalling Poulenc and infused with the high octane intellectual aroma of 1950s Parisian café life.

According to the composer’s son, Jacques, this particularly rich parody involving onomatopoeic word-play (kitchen noises) and plenty of gastronomic puns, requires a ‘fondu exceptionnel’, the perfect blend of voices, which he says I Fagiolini delivers par excellence. Conductor Robert Hollingworth says: “it’s a joy to sing, and a meal in itself to learn.”

Alongside Françaix’s amuse-oreille is Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s 12-voice masterpiece, Les Cantique Des Cantiques. Composed within two years of the Françaix, it portrays the erotically charged Biblical Song of Songs as a dialogue between Christ and the Church. In a ravishing and symphonic kaleidoscope of colours Daniel-Lesur’s constantly changing combination of voices transforms the Old Testament verses into a profound Christian meditation.

These two large-scale works are separated by a collection of smaller pieces designed as a series of palette-cleaning sorbets between the main courses. Francis Poulenc struggled for nearly 20 years to set poems by his friend, the surrealist, Paul Éluard, employing dramatic harmonic shifts to reflect emotions that veer violently between extremes to find sublime moments of exquisite tenderness.

There is also a nod to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Eric Satie as the pianist, Anna Markland, plays three of Satie’s six gentle Gnossiennes. Winner of the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year in 1982 at the age of 17, Anna Markland joined I Fagiolini four years later as a soprano and she takes centre stage as pianist in the second world premiere on the album, playing one of her favourite pieces in a specially commissioned vocalised version by a former member of I Fagiolini, Roderick Williams, now one of the UK’s leading baritones.

He has taken words by Baudelaire and Rimbaud and set them within the reflective and moving middle movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G.

For the group’s Director, Robert Hollingworth (celebrating his 50th birthday this year), this recording is a long held ambition. Of all languages, he finds French the most beautiful to sing in and says there is a world of wonders in the 20th Century French choral repertoire. “I adore it. It feels as much a part of me as any Monteverdi madrigal. The sensuality of the language, the shifting sands of harmony; it feels very chaleureux and something I Fagiolini has long sung and adored.”

Anna Markland, piano
I Fagiolini
Robert Hollingworth, conductor

I Fagiolini
Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Ensemble Award, 2005 Founded in 1986, I Fagiolini has undertaken a host of innovative productions of Renaissance and contemporary work, all designed around the core idea of how audiences actually receive music when much of it is several hundred years out of context. With director Peter Wilson, the group explored Italian Renaissance comedies and short French and Spanish pieces from the period, producing a masked version of Handel’s Acis & Galatea and a puppet version of Purcell’s The Indian Queen. In 2005, with The Opera Group, I Fagiolini performed Ed Hughes’ The Birds for 10 singers, actor, two instrumentalists and no conductor.

Hailed by The Times as “A compelling but upsetting piece of theatre… A bleak but brilliant evening,” and The Guardian as “an unforgettable experience”, The Full Monteverdi, directed by John La Bouchardière, ran for 88 performances, finishing with a run at the Lincoln Center, New York.

The name I Fagiolini has been misspelt and mispronounced throughout the world: the group has visited some of its most interesting countries, including Hong Kong, China, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, the Ukraine and the USA, often as ambassadors for the British Council. In April 1997 the singers spent two weeks in South Africa working with a choir from Soweto on a partly improvised album, Simunye. This original and moving project was released by Erato on its crossover label Detour, and toured to Europe, South Africa and Bermuda, returning in May 2006 for an acclaimed UK tour.

Other collaborations have always been a pleasure: Bach with the Orchestra of the Age Enlightenment, Barokksolistene, Feinstein Ensemble and Academy of Ancient Music, Christmas Vespers in Venice with the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, Byrd with the viol consorts Fretwork and Concordia, and Warlock and Anne Dudley with the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Robert Hollingworth.

I Fagiolini’s work on Monteverdi now appears on CD with Sweet Torment, the third in their Monteverdi series for Chandos. The group has released 14 other CDs including English Renaissance works and a focus on Venice with Carnevale Veneziano, Andrea Gabrieli – The Madrigal in Venice, and a DVD of Vecchi’s masked comedy L’Amfiparnaso with actor Simon Callow. This was the first DVD of a staged Renaissance work and described as “a silk purse [turned] into one beaded in gold… we end up with the best of all worlds” (Gramophone) and “a triumph for I Fagiolini and Chandos and a benchmark for the DVD industry as a whole” (International Record Review). Mind you, a French reviewer absolutely loathed it.

Robert Hollingworth
Monteverdi specialist Robert Hollingworth founded I Fagiolini in 1986. Directing this group has taken up most of his time since but he has directed other ensembles at home and abroad, most recently the BBC Singers, NDR Chor, the Academy of Ancient Music and St James’ Baroque. In 2004 he directed the Nederlands Kamerkoor in a ground-breaking new music-theatre project, Faust, which he created with Henk Schut. Acclaimed by the Dutch press, it was set in startling venues: a vast Amsterdam ship-building yard, a disused station, and Bremen Cathedral. He directed Opera Zuid’s underground production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. He has conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra in a project with The Full Monty composer, Anne Dudley, and the BBC Singers in programmes of Jakob Gallus, Giovanni Croce and Vivaldi. He writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio, notably The Early Music Show and Discovering Music, and has worked on a number of films including Quills. In 2006 he was appointed as one of the artistic advisors to the York Early Music Festival and for 2009 to the Trigonale Festival in Austria; he founded the spectacular Islington Winter Music Festival. He regularly leads choral courses and is once again directing at Dartington International Summer School in 2010.

Booklet for Amuse-Bouche