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Revamped Rodin museum reopens in Paris

A jewel of the Paris art landscape is ready to return. After getting a three-year long makeover the Rodin museum in Paris is finally set to reopen this week.

Revamped Rodin museum reopens in Paris
Photo: AFP

The French prime minister on Monday inaugurated the revamped Rodin Museum in Paris, which is set to open to the public later
this week following three years of renovation work.

The museum, dedicated to the work of French sculptor Auguste Rodin, famed for his statue “The Thinker”, is one of the country's most popular museums with around 700,000 visitors a year.


(Prime Minister Manuel Valls tours the revamped Rodin Museum. Photo: AFP)

French premier Manuel Valls recalled visiting the museum with his artist father and hailed the sculptor's determination to present “his vision, how things really are” in the face of convention.

The historic Hotel Biron, which has housed the museum since 1919, underwent ba complete overhaul over the last three years, for the first time since Rodin himself used it as his Paris studio until his death in 1917.

The museum said the new layout will highlight Rodin's creative development and allow some works to be brought out of storage and displayed for the first time.

It reopens to the public on Thursday.


(Photo: AFP)

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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