À l'ombre d'un ormeau | réédition

This recording has the merit of happily combining the learned know-how of the “conservatory” and a sensitivity educated by the habit of accompanying the dancers, an extremely rare osmosis. F. Lazarevitch has the chance to participate in two musical worlds and to excel in each of them. […] Besides the beauty of the works, there is first of all that of the sound […]. There is also the dazzling quality of the execution […]. And I hope that the revelation, in addition to the repertoires, will also extend to the way of playing them.

Meticulous elaboration succeeded by Lazarevitch, whose sense of instrumental intensification (in the Boismortier Village Ballet) and rhythmic (from the beginning movements, whose syncopations gradually assert themselves) works wonders.

To exist several centuries later, this fragile music requires musicians with sure taste and a mind keen to pose hypotheses. This is the case of the Musicians of Saint-Julien, a talented band brought together by François Lazarevitch.

The glory of this récital is the brunettes sung by soprano Annie Dufresne […] a superb, artless-seeming stylist gifted with a brilliant yet sweet and sexy voice, her vocal agility easily overcomes the demands of these songs’ florid diminutions. […] Most impressive is the clarity of Dufresne’s trills, a rarity indeed in today’s early music world. 

Listening to In the Shadow of a Abalone firstly constitutes a moment of the most exquisite musical refinement. […] Thus the instrumentarium takes us into a future of the past with lightness, finesse and flexibility and in a diversity of formats where the alternation between musical and vocal moments shows all the richness of these repertoires. A CD which should delight fans of music from the century in question but more broadly of traditional music, as the approach to interpreting the repertoires is so similar. […] We are obviously waiting for the sequel, as in any good self-respecting saga!

Offered by musicians who have been able to broaden their fields of action, it allows us to set foot on land, those of shores that we wanted to be distant by their social environments and their eras. Thanks to the Musicians of Saint-Julien, the elite becomes popular and the past embraces the present.

What delights in this disc is both the naturalness of the style, because Lazarevitch and his accomplices never claim to raise the tone of this music, and the refinement and rhythmic perfection of the interpretation. We feel all the qualities that were needed to make this apparent freedom in pieces that are not as easy as their apparent simplicity might lead you to believe. Soprano Annie Dufresne is in tune, the purity of a fruity timbre and the frankness of expression make us forget the obvious art of ornamentation. […] An hour of real pleasure, a very nice disc for lovers of byways of the French repertoire