Samuel-Holeman / Claes / Haeperen - Jeune Fille a la Fenetre [CD]

A contemporary of Claude Debussy, and a close friend of Maurice Maeterlinck, the composer Eugène Samuel-Holeman (1863-1942) takes us to the heart of the end-of-the-century in Belgium, to a place between symbolism and modernism. La jeune fille à la fenêtre (1904) is a monodrama sung on a text by the writer Camille Lemonnier, a major figure of the Belgian letters. Created and defended for ten years by the famous mezzo Jane Bathori, this "lyrical prose" astonishing as it's instrumentation as it's innovative harmonies, is a witness of the emancipation of the musical language at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.