New. Mel Bonis: Orchestral Works
Elizabeth Watts (soprano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Rumon Gamba
Awards:
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Presto Recording of the Week, 12th June 2026
Gamba and the BBCSSO perform everything wonderfully well. Trois femmes is gorgeous in its heady immediacy and kaleidoscopic detail...It's an album that adds much to our understanding of Bonis's...
New. Mel Bonis: Orchestral Works
Elizabeth Watts (soprano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Rumon Gamba
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Presto Recording of the Week, 12th June 2026
Gamba and the BBCSSO perform everything wonderfully well. Trois femmes is gorgeous in its heady immediacy and kaleidoscopic detail...It's an album that adds much to our understanding of Bonis's...
About
Mel (Mélanie Hélène) Bonis was born in Paris in 1858, and showed a prodigious talent for music from an early age, attending the Paris Conservatoire from the age of sixteen, studying alongside Debussy and Pierné under César Franck. Her passionate relationship with the singer Amédée-Louis Hettich was frowned upon by her parents, who pressured her to marry Édouard Domange, a twice-widowed industrialist with five children.
Bonis threw herself into her role as wife and stepmother, until a reunion with Hettich in the 1890s reignited her serious interest in composition. She composed more than 300 works, including pieces for solo piano, chamber music, and over forty mélodies for voice and piano. As Bonis was too modest for self-promotion, and a victim of gender-bias, her music fell into obscurity after the First World War, and she became bedridden from arthritis. She continued to compose until her death, in 1937. Her orchestral output dates from two decades, between 1891 and 1912, and is well represented on this album.
Contents and tracklist
Spotlight on this release
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Mel Bonis from Rumon Gamba and the BBCSSO
12th Jun 2026
The Scottish orchestra delivers characterful performances of works including the Trois Femmes de Légende and Suite Orientale, with soprano Elizabeth Watts on luminous form in the Noël de la Vierge Marie.
Awards and reviews
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Presto Recording of the Week12th June 2026
August 2026
Gamba and the BBCSSO perform everything wonderfully well. Trois femmes is gorgeous in its heady immediacy and kaleidoscopic detail...It's an album that adds much to our understanding of Bonis's work, and is well worth hearing.
June 2026
Rumon Gamba is a truly amazing conductor and his devotion to bringing to our attention music by overlooked female composers is one of the chief joys... This music is delightful – not earth-shattering, but beautifully conceived, orchestrated and presented by all concerned.
12th June 2026
It’s Cleopatra who receives the most extensive treatment [in the The album opens with the Trois Femmes de Légende], the BBCSSO strings revelling in the lush, chromatic writing.…And the closing Les Gitanos is a corker: credit for the colourful orchestration here actually goes to Bonis’s contemporary Adolphe Gauwin, with Gamba milking its Offenbach-ish vulgarity to the max.
25th June 2026
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Rumon Gamba do full justice to her finely crafted, perfumed orchestral music on this new studio recording...Several feel like interludes, over almost before they have begun, but no less enjoyable for that; these pieces are slender yet perfectly formed.
