Description
This is a pre-order. It will ship on or around 12/11/26
For more than twenty-five years, Le Sacre du Tympan has been Fred Pallem's orchestra and his chosen means of expression. A shape-shifting ensemble with a dozen albums to its name and countless concerts across France and abroad, it serves three purposes: championing Pallem's own compositions, staging musical shows for young audiences, and building re-arranged repertoire programmes devoted to composers who have shaped his musical world, among them Andre Popp, Michel Legrand, the Blaxploitation era, Michel Magne, and above all Francois De Roubaix. In 2008, the orchestra had already devised a De Roubaix programme for the Jazz a la Villette festival: five musicians favouring the composer's electronics and analogue keyboards, a repertoire later recorded in 2015. For the fiftieth anniversary of De Roubaix's death in November 2025, Pallem widens the lens to the orchestral dimension of his work, setting it against masters such as Ennio Morricone, Michel Legrand and John Barry, and for the first time attempts re-orchestrations in the form of hypnotic medleys, blending several themes into single, sweeping suites. Film scores, opening titles and melodies lodged deep in the collective memory make up the record, captured during rehearsals for the orchestra's Paris concerts. Recording an album from rehearsal tapes rather than dedicated studio sessions preserves the ensemble's live spark: strings, brass, guitar, keyboards and bass all voicing De Roubaix's world with the same delight the musicians took in playing it. That shared pleasure carries through the tapes, and the whole group agreed the sessions deserved to be released as they stood, unpolished energy included. The result restores the strength of De Roubaix's themes and the richness of his harmonies and timbres, sounds that have crossed the decades without ageing, standing comparison with the composers he himself once influenced, from Morricone's widescreen drama to Legrand's melodic ease and Barry's brooding romanticism.
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