Trois Chansons de France

This is not an attempt to compete against Claude Debussy’s inimitable orchestral language, but rather to re-visualise this stunningly beautiful piano lieder in my own orchestral timbre as if in a dream. Rather than an historicised attempt to imitate, which would be fruitless, I see the works as two different cycles. I have endeavoured to listen into the most concealed corners of his original set of Trois Chansons de France and Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé , without imposing a single foreign note and fusing my own tonal world with the magical voice of Christian Gerhaher, to whom I feel very close. He is the dedicatee of the two orchestral cycles. Heinz Holliger