Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset N. JOMMELLI Armida Abbandonata

ARMIDA ABBANDONATA

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset PERGOLESI Stabat Mater

                                                                STABAT MATER

Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset ANTONIO SALIERI Tarare

After Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Les Talens Lyriques concludes the group’s cycle of Antonio Salieri’s French operas with the world premiere recording of Tarare.  Often unfairly overshadowed by his brilliant contemporary Mozart, Salieri here composed a genuine masterpiece on the only libretto ever written by Beaumarchais.

Salieri has a taste for exoticism and, like Mozart in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he transports us into a fantasy Orient seen through the eyes of the pre-revolutionary philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The indefatigable Christophe Rousset, unswerving in his efforts to revive scores that are rarely performed or have mysteriously languished in the shadows, directs a five- star cast: the Captain of the Guard Tarare (Cyrille Dubois) enters the palace of the Sultan Atar (Jean-Sébastien Bou) in order to rescue his beloved, the slave Astasie (Karine Deshayes). Behind the love triangle, one senses Beaumarchais’s indictment of authority in his depiction (in 1787!) of the people’s revolt against the Sultan’s tyrannical power - so much so that it is astonishing that the plot escaped the royal censor’s net.

The music follows the story’s misunderstandings, plot twists and spectacular scenes to produce an opera that prefigures Romanticism, exhilaratingly performed by Les Talens Lyriques and Les Chantres of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. A release that should restore Salieri’s prestige once and for all.

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset FRANÇOIS COUPERIN Les Nations

The 350th anniversary of François Couperin's birth evoked less activity than other anniversaries in the year 2018, when this album appeared, but if you missed it you might find this a worthwhile acquisition as a state-of-the-art Couperin performance. Harpsichordist/director Christophe Rousset and his ensemble Les Talens Lyriques are lyrical indeed in the set of trio sonatas called Les Nations, "the nations." The set purports to evoke four nations: France, Spain, L'Imperiale (the Holy Roman Empire), and La piémontaise (the Piedmont kingdom, in Italy). Whatever features might have suggested these national styles are hard to hear now, and really Les Nations is above all one of the works in which Couperin cultivated what he called elsewhere les goûts réunis, the "reunited" tastes of Italy and France. In the four Nations, his solution was unique: each of the four parts consists of a little Corellian Italian sonade, or sonata, with its own four sections compacted into a single movement, followed by suite of French dances. You might wonder why trio sonatas would require the larger ensemble of Les Talens Lyriques, but this works: the set probably would not have been performed at a stretch in Couperin's time, and Rousset changes things up with varying forces. Best of all, the playing of Rousset's group is honed to a delightful languor, a smoothness and grace that have rarely been equaled in the historical-performance sphere. The sarabandes get flutes instead of violins, and you could sample the one from the Impériale suite for a taste. Browse the paintings of Lancret or Watteau while you do, and you may experience peak French. Just lovely. (James Manheim)

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset FRANÇOIS COUPERIN Ariane consolée par Bacchus - Apothéoses de Lully & de Corelli

Here, for the first time, we can hear what appears to be a lost cantata by François Couperin. Numerous of his secular airs, chansons and canons survive in manuscript and print, but until now none of the cantatas known to have existed at the time of his death (1733) have been found. Rousset’s cogent argument for attributing this anonymous manuscript work, hitherto known only from a 1716 Amsterdam catalogue entry as ‘Ariane abandonée’, is, I believe, compelling.

This Ariane consolée par Bacchus, somewhat unusually, is for a baritone. Although best known as an opera singer and recitalist of later repertoire, Stéphane Degout adjusts his voice to the varied pace within the recitatives and expresses words such as ‘douceur’ in the first Air and the tongue-twisting text of the ritournelle in the final Air with the lightest touch. Moreover, the acoustic of the Eglise Saint-Pierre (Paris) allows us to enjoy both the warmth of his voice and the detail of his fluent ornamentation. The presence of Christophe Coin playing the concertante bass viol part in these tracks adds further to the pleasure to be had from listening to this modern premiere.

The remaining works on the disc were recorded in the exceptional acoustic of the former 14th-century monastery Les Dominicains de Haute-Alsace. Couperin’s entertaining pair of apotheoses accorded to Lully and Corelli is almost unique in the repertoire because of his ‘acerbic’ programmatic commentaries, elegantly delivered here by Rousset from the keyboard. These works have been recorded many times but rarely so well. Rousset’s vision for his ensemble of oboes, flutes, violins and viol is sublime, as too are his harpsichord realisations. This is a landmark recording to treasure. (Julie Anne Sadie / Gramophone)

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset ANTONIO SALIERI Les Horaces

Les Talens Lyriques are a major french classical music ensemble, recognized on the international scale for both its musicological work and editorial choices. Created twenty years ago by french harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset. The ensemble has a large lyrical and instrumental repertoire ranging from Baroque to Early Romanticism.

Following the release of Les Danaïdes in 2015, Les Talens Lyriques present the first world recording of Antonio Salieri’s Les Horaces, which they recreated at Versailles in 2016. To bring this score back to life, Christophe Rousset gathered a vocal cast in which tenor Cyrille Dubois, Judith van Wanroij, Julien Dran or Jean-Sebastien Bou embody the fate of the characters inspired by the fratricidal struggle of Horatius and Curiatius in Ancient Rome, dramatically revived by an already romantic Salieri in his musical boldness. Fights, vows and great crowd scenes, the tears of heroine Camilla, the Curiatius’ dilemma, or the implacable determination of old Horatius offer intense and original drama.

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU Pygmalion

Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques bring us to the stage of the Royal Academy of Music where Pygmalion, an act of ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau inspired by an episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was created in 1748. Love, showing empathy for Pygmalion’s despair of loving a statue, invigorates the sculpted woman who immediately falls in love with her creator. Very suggestive, the music of this tender and mischievous ballet deploys the grace of 18^th century dances. Like Ovid’s Love, Christophe Rousset instils life in this score, one of Rameau’s greatest successes in his day, and offers us, thanks to his sense of drama and his impeccable leadership, a new and essential reading of this ballet.

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset ANTONIO SACCHINI Renaud

 

 Renaud (1783) marked Sacchini's debut in Paris. Despite much criticism from the supporters of his rivals Gluck and Piccinni, Renaud was a success and Sacchini became the new favourite of Marie- Antoinette. Encouraged by the public who saw him as one of the finest composers of that time, he enriched the repertoire of the Paris Opéra with several masterpieces. Some of them were staged regularly for many years. Renaud was presented almost without interruption until 1799, and was revived in 1815. This recording has been made at the Arsenal of Metz in October 2012.

Rosemary Joshua / Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset HENRY PURCELL Harmonia Sacra

As Purcell song programmes go, this one is not easy listening. Perhaps only the Evening Hymn would count as a ‘favourite’. And, whereas most anthologies, mixing the sacred with the secular, could leaven the penitential tone of ‘With sick and famish’d eyes’ or the traumatic drama of ‘Tell me some pitying angel’ with lighter-hearted fare, the atmosphere in these 16 devotional songs from the Harmonia sacra volumes are predominantly gloomy, even self-lacerating. This is not to criticise but rather to warn that this is earnest stuff, even when the mood brightens briefly, as in, say, ‘We sing to him, whose wisdom form’d the ear’. On the other hand, when one of the great vocal magicians of the Baroque era writes for connoisseurs, one has to marvel at the sustained declamatory power of ‘In the black, dismal dungeon of despair’, the formal coherence of even such a sectionally conceived piece as ‘Lord, what is man?’ and the effortless sophistication of the word-setting at every turn. Two of the works here, by the way, are anonymous rather than by Purcell, though the booklet manages to make it seem as if only note-writer Bruce Wood is aware of the fact.

Rosemary Joshua brings vocal security and textual intelligence to these works and though a slightly flighty vibrato sometimes threatens the music’s intimacy, it does not get in the way of superbly realised greater dramatic truth. The continuo accompaniments are as sensitively accomplished as one would expect from such a line-up, and when Christophe Rousset steps forward in a handful of short harpsichord solos, he finds a grandeur in Purcell’s keyboard music not always apparent in other performances. If this is a sober disc, it is also one which reeks of Purcell’s genius. (Gramophone)

Véronique Gens / Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset TRAGÉDIENNES 2

This is the second instalment of Véronique Gens's Tragédiennes series, which examines how francophone composers from the 18th and early 19th centuries dealt with the heroines of classical tragedy. Classical, in this context, means Racine as well as Greek and Roman drama, though Gens contentiously widens the definition even further at one point to include a chunk of Sacchini's Renaud, based on Tasso's Renaissance epic Gerusalemme Liberata. The programme is variable, with giants such as Gluck and Berlioz placed alongside also-rans such as Piccinni and Grétry. All of it, however, requires the ability to sing words as well as phrases, and Gens's immaculate way with a text is often as mesmerising as her ability to sustain the long sculpted lines that are a common stylistic feature among her chosen composers. There are some surprises: she sings Cassandra's music from Berlioz's Les Troyens, where we might expect to hear her as Dido; when she turns to Cherubini's Medea, for what is probably the greatest track on the disc, it is to play the sorrowing maid Neris, rather than the pathological heroine. Her accompanists are Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, a bit lightweight in Berlioz, but startling and effective elsewhere. (Tim Ashley / The Guardian)

Véronique Gens / Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset TRAGÉDIENNES

The tragic operas of the French Baroque can be rough going for the new listener, whose eyes may glaze over when hearing about rules of French prosody, classical models, and Lully's dominance of the scene. But this single-disc recital solves any problems you may have had in encountering operatic music from Lully to Gluck. Credit soprano Véronique Gens, who has often sung lighter material and now is turning to the serious works of Rameau and his era at just the right time. Her voice is impressively versatile, with a muscular medium-wave vibrato that can easily drop off into a stage whisper or rise into anger. Credit conductor Christophe Rousset and his group Les Talens Lyriques, with their on-the-ball, sensitive accompaniment and unique catgut-scraping string sound. Credit booklet writer Jean Duron for a quick, painless introduction to the 100-year history of how French opera composers, working in the centralized musical system of the French monarchy, responded to the musical world as it changed around them. Credit the engineers from Virgin Classics, who have made the Church of Notre Dame-du-Liban in Paris into something resembling a close-up, row-five theatrical experience, and caught the powerful sense of immediacy and communication in Gens' singing. And credit whoever devised the program, which offers good-sized chunks of music from various operas, complete with overtures and other instrumental interludes, instead of a sequence of disconnected arias and random sonatas linked to the main program only by chronology. This album will earn praise from those who follow Gens closely, and for the general listener looking to hear some French Baroque opera arias it's a godsend -- the tragic heroine is a central figure of the era, and Gens and company have brought her fully to life. (James Manheim)