With her new album, Quebec contralto, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, comes to paint, at the pinnacle of her voice, among the most beautiful canvases of the vocal repertoire of French romanticism with Les Nuits d’été by Hector Berlioz, Les Mélodies persanes by Camille Saint- Saëns and Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. Each cycle is a long poetic story through which the composers tell of melancholy, love, travel, and the Other, both imaginary and distant. The musical exoticism presented there from various angles of expression, mainly in the cycles of Ravel and Saint-Saëns, rubs shoulders with the theme of love: at the same time young, incandescent, and full of sadness of “Summer Nights” by Berlioz. The melodies are rendered with intensity and expressive nuances by Lemieux who bites into each poetic universe with vigor, sensitivity, and earthy excitement supported dynamically and intelligently by the Monte-Carlo Orchestra under the direction of conductor Kazuki Yamada.
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