Offenbach colorature
With this new album devoted to the French Romantic repertory, Alpha Classics and the Palazzetto Bru Zane continue their faithful companionship along unfamiliar paths. This time it is the irresistibly vivacious Jodie Devos who places her talent at the service of a project to which she has dedicated herself with a curiosity and high artistic standards that do her honour. The repertory explored in this programme, suggested by the Centre de musique romantique française, needed exactly her freshness and tenderness to reveal its full stature: listening to this anthology of airs performed in this way, one realises that Offenbach was no less skilled in the art of half-tones than in scenes of comedy or derision. Alongside some famous numbers, this recording reveals an unknown facet of the composer in longforgotten works. In fact, the Palazzetto Bru Zane needed to produce the performing material for most of the music on this programme.