Songs of Love, War and Melancholy: The Operatic Fantasias of Jacques-François Gallay

The third installment in Anneke Scott's series of works by the French natural horn player and composer Jacques-François Gallay presents a thrilling programme of operatic fantasias & songs.

These fascinating and unique works mix incredibly virtuosic music with beautifully lyrical melodies deeply influenced by Gallay's position as solo horn of the Parisian Théâtre Italien. For this final volume in the series, Scott is joined by the celebrated pianist Steven Devine and renowned soprano Lucy Crowe.

In this recording, Anneke Scott performs on a natural horn (cor solo) by Marcel-Auguste Raoux dating from 1823 (Loaned with kind permission by the Bate Collection, University of Oxford), while plays a grand piano by Érard, from 1851. (Loaned with kind permission by the University of Birmingham).

'[Anneke Scott] produces some wonderfully plangent tone colours [...] Her playing, and that of Stephen Devine, has a natural musicality that is particularly noticeable in the way they both apply an easy flexibility to the flow of the music. Soprano Lucy Crowe's three contributions are similarly noteworthy.' - Early Music Review