Jacques Offenbach - Folies symphoniques; Ouvertures (Howard Griffiths)

Information

Composer: Jacques Offenbach

1. Les bavards: Ouverture
2. Les bergers: Ouverture
3. Le roi Carotte, Act IV: Entracte
4. Monsieur Choufleuri restera chez lui, le: Ouverture
5. Les brigands: Ouverture
6. Ba-ta-clan: Ouverture
7. Geneviève de Brabant: Ouverture - Act III Entracte
8. Monsieur et Madame Denis: Ouverture
9. La créole: Ouverture
10. La princesse de Trébizonde: Ouverture
11. Madame Favart: Ouverture
12. L'île de Tulipatan: Ouverture

Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt
Howard Griffiths, conductor

Date: 2019
Label: cpo
https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/art/jacques-offenbach-ouvertueren/hnum/8921600

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Review

Jacques Offenbach wrote some 100 operettas. An exact number is difficult to specify, for he reused and recycled works in order to maintain his incredible rate of productivity. Even with this taken into account, he was a prolific and reliable tunesmith, and contemporary recordings have not gone far beyond scratching the surface of his works. The Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt under Howard Griffiths addresses the deficit with this set of Offenbach overtures and entr'actes, largely avoiding the few familiar pieces. Offenbach's overtures, like those of contemporary musicals, are mostly not independent pieces but consist of tunes from the operas themselves. It is fair to say that many of these tunes would have been on the lips of Parisians of the middle 19th century. Sample the Overture to Les Bavards ("The Chatterboxes") for a taste. The titles make interesting reading, and the works themselves provide a lens into the preoccupations of French culture with a satirical edge that is often reflected in one way of another in the music here. Several of the pieces have exotic settings, and Ba-ta-clan (the Paris concert hall attacked by terrorists in 2017 is its namesake), a "chinoiserie musicale" of 1855, is a clear ancestor to The Mikado. Given the comparative lack of representation of Offenbach of any kind on CD and online, this release is welcome.

-- James Manheim, AllMusic

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Jacques Offenbach (20 June 1819 in Cologne – 5 October 1880 in Paris) was a German-French composer, cellist and impresario of the romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffmann remains part of the standard opera repertory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Offenbach

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Howard Griffiths (born 24 February 1950 in Hastings) is a British conductor. Griffiths studied music at the Royal College of Music, London, and has lived in Switzerland since 1981. He was Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra from 1996 to 2006. Since the season 2007/08, he is General Music Director of the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester, and has also appeared as a guest conductor with many leading orchestras all over the world. Griffiths has a broad repertoire, with about 100 CD recordings with various labels (including Warner, Universal, cpo, Sony and Koch).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Griffiths_(conductor)

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