Today he would have turned 100 years old. This Wednesday, May 22, marks the centenary of the birth of Charles Aznavour, who died on October 1, 2018 at the age of 94. For the occasion, Universal launches a complete box set that covers the artist’s career. An exhaustive retrospective that required hours of work, from archaeological investigation to restoration.
One hundred albums, 1,800 songs: Charles Aznavour: the complete work It brings together the singer’s most emblematic works as well as his forgotten treasures. Live albums, children’s albums, songs in French, Italian, Spanish…
It took two years to complete this project, in addition to the intervention of Bruno Haye, responsible for the Aznavour catalog for 10 years at the Panthéon label (Universal), who came out of retirement for the occasion.
“It is so gigantic that neither two nor four ears are enough,” he told BFMTV at the Universal safe in the Paris region.
“You have to do it with five or six people to avoid mistakes, find all the little details that are wrong, improve everything, be sure that we have taken the correct versions… all of that was very long.”
Restoration, a work of art
In addition, it was necessary to inventory all the foreign vinyls to find the 540 good songs among the 16,500 takes of the master tapes preserved in archives, to finally reconstitute the 41 vinyls. This is how the nuggets were found:
“Among the albums in Spanish we find a complete LP, the Christmas album,” continues Bruno Haye. “He never came out.”
Once the tapes were found, the second part of the work took place in a studio in Noisy-le-Roi (Yvelines). Second by second, track by track, the songs were restored.
Other projects will accompany this centenary of Charles Aznavour in the coming months. Venice is so sad In turn, it must be reworked and, on June 3, La Poste will issue a stamp with the singer’s image.
Source: BFM TV
