Georges Guiraud News
French organist, composer and music educator (1868-1928)
- pipe organ
- France
- organist, composer, music teacher
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2024-04-24
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2024-04-06 11:15:00
Bizet's Carmen at Covent Garden: gritty realism & a reluctance to add any local colour & movement, redeemed by musical performances
Bizet: Carmen, Act One - Blaise Malaba, Aighul Akhmetshina - Royal Opera House (Photo: ROH/Camilla Greenwell)Bizet: Carmen; Aigul Akhmetshina, Piortr Beczala, Olga Kulchynska, Kostas Smoriginas, director: Damiano Michieletto, conductor: Antonello Manacorda; Royal OperaReviewed 5 April 2024The new production pairs finely musical performances with a sense of gritty realism and a reluctance to add any local colour and movement.For all its iconic status and abundance of good tunes, Bizet's Carmen remains something of a challenge for large opera companies. Until relatively recently matters of edition and style were unquestioning, the grand opera version with Ernest Guiraud's recitatives and a setting that was 'traditional 19th-century Spain'. Since then, things have got more complex with a return to using the opera comique version and a wish to avoid the lazy stage-Spanish stereo-types. It is worth emphasising that the Bizet's opera has little Spanish input, composer, librettists and original author were all French men. And whilst the […]
2023-10-26 14:00:37
Orchestre National de Lyon/Szeps-Znaider(Bru Zane, two CDs)This two-disc compilation provides a potted history of the symphonic poem genre in France. Charlotte Sohy’s little known Danse Mystique stands out as a remarkable discoveryThe symphonic poem came of age with the dozen or so examples that Liszt completed in the 1850s. The genre soon split into nationalist schools – Czech works by Smetana and Dvořák, Russian by Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, German by Strauss and Schoenberg – and Bru Zane’s two-disc compilation provides a potted history of the genre in France, from César Franck to Lili Boulanger. Some of the 15 works included are concert staples – Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit, Paul Dukas’ L’Apprenti Sorcier, Emmanuel Chabrier’s España, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre – but many of the other composers represented here are forgotten now.Stylistically they are a highly varied bunch: there are still traces of Berlioz in Ernest Guiraud’s Ouverture d’Arteveld from 1874, for […]
2022-07-22 17:04:14
Debussy’s Petite Suite was published in its original piano four-hands version in 1889, and transcriptions for solo piano and for violin and piano appeared in 1906. What catapulted it to true popularity, however, was its 1907 adaptation for chamber orchestra by Henri Büsser (1872-1973). Throughout his long life of 101 years, Büsser played an important supporting role in French musical life, remaining sharp and involved to the very end. As a youngster he had studied organ with César Franck and composition with Gounod, Massenet, and Guiraud. In 1905 he was named chief conductor of the Paris Opéra, and in 1939
2020-06-06 08:47:14
A fascinating conundrum - Les contes d'Hoffmann: with its troubled genesis & editorial confusion, Offenbach's final opera seems unique, yet it developed out ideas from the composer's lesser-known late period
[…] but afterwards the title role was re-cast for tenor (for Alexandre Talzac) and the four sopranos were to be sung by a brilliant coloratura soprano, Adèle Isaac, so this role was adjusted too. Whilst Les contes d'Hoffmann was premiered at the Opéra-Comique, the event took place four months after Offenbach's death and the version presented was some way from Offenbach's original conception. The version seen at the premiere was created by Ernest Guiraud, who finished the orchestration and applied the cuts demanded by the Opéra-Comique's director, Leon Carvalho. Then for the work's Viennese premiere later that year, Guiraud supplied recitatives. But this wasn't the end of the story. The opera's dress rehearsal had lasted from 8pm to 12.30am, and the Giulietta act, with its three scene changes, took nearly an hour. The act was reduced to a single scene and then Carvalho removed it […]
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