To the hundredth!

It's hard to imagine a more sympathetic greeting for a 100th birthday. Not an ephemeral bouquet of flowers, not an embarrassing gift, not an interchangeable word - no, a whole hour of lovingly selected music. The Kaléidoscope The CD with works and recordings by Julien-François Zbinden is much more than a sonorous declaration of love from the archives of Radio Télévision Suisse and the Studio de Lausanne. It documents a rich and playful life as a pianist and composer and in this case is dedicated neither to the symphony nor the string quartet, but to all those often marginalized genres that are not at home in the concert hall or have lost their traditional place in today's media business: Music for wind orchestra, the so-called "light muse" and the French chanson.

The result is a wonderful bouquet full of rarities, produced mainly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which Julien-François Zbinden can be heard either as a soloist playing one of the great jazz standards, as an accompanist on the piano or as the creator of new scores. The fact that Zbinden himself still actively worked on the booklet testifies to his unbroken physical and mental vitality. May she remain with us for a while yet!