Award-winning vocal group I Fagiolini celebrate their 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 Italian Renaissance music.
Arranged as a tasting menu, this new Decca Classics recording includes two world premieres bursting with Gallic flavour. Chief among them is the world premiere recording of a humorous and erotically charged hommage 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 goût, by Brillat-Savarins. Composed in 1953 but never since performed or recorded, Françaix’s set of songs is best described as “‘9½ Weeks’ meets Jacques Brel meets Raymond Blanc.”
Alongside Françaix’s complex concoction is Cantique Des Cantiques by Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur, composed within two years of the Françaix piece. It portrays the erotically charged Biblical Song of Songs as a dialogue between Christ and the Church.
Also central to the programme is the slow movement of Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, in a world premiere arrangement for voices and piano set to a text by Verlaine. The pianist is Anna Markland, the second ever BBC Young Musician of the Year (1982) who has run a parallel career as a singer with I Fagiolini since its inception.
These large-scale works are separated by a collection of smaller pieces designed as a series of “amuse bouches” in-between the main courses, including a nod to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Eric Satie as pianist Anna Markland plays three of Satie’s six gentle Gnossiennes.