Jacques Ibert: le chevalier errant

The suite Le Chevalier errant receives on this disc its first recording. Le Chevalier errant the wandering knight is of course Don Quixote. In a radio interview in 1954 Ibert explained that the character of Don Quixote [] was conceived not as he usually is, with a little beard, a barbers bowl on his head and an hallucinatory air, but as he sees himself in the course of the adventures he lives so intensely. Hence a musical translation that avoids cliché and is both forceful and poetic. Rounding out the record is Les Amours de Jupiter, a grand ballet, depicting the many conquests of the master of Olympus: Europa, Leda, Danaë, Ganymede, before the return of Juno to the conjugal bed.