Véronique Gens / Ensemble Les Surprises / Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas PASSION

 

PASSION

 

Ensemble Correspondances / Sébastien Daucé MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Messe à quatre chœurs

 

MESSE À QUATRE CHOEURS

 

Marie Magistry / Sylvain Bergeron LA BERGÈRE

LA BERGÈRE

 

Les Arts Florissants / William Christie CHARPENTIER La Descente D'Orphée aux Enfers

LA DESCENTE D'ORPHÉE AUX ENFERS

Ensemble Marguerite Louise / Gaétan Jarry MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Les Arts Florissans

At that time, the custom was to allow great exibility in matters of orchestration, which was linked to whatever vital forces were available and depended on when the performance of the works was programmed. Charpentier’s genius lies in the fact that that he had the ability to conceive his scores, even the most minimalist of them as works of a major stature. 

Les Arts Florissants and La Couronne de Fleurs are an unquestionable example of this: the two operas became known as much for their subtlety and their intimacy in their original form (small ensemble and chorus of soloists), as for their depth and their density in their augmented form (use of an orchestra and a full choir). 

We have therefore chosen to explore the “augmented form”, and thus allow the works to offer a more varied orchestration, to benefit from the full choir), and also offer various theatrical effects such as the use of percussion instruments. Expanded in this way, these miniatures rehabilitate a Charpentier who was denied during his time of the great financial means from which only Lully was able to benefit. 

The extracts chosen from the Couronne de Fleurs present the pastoral as a sort of logical epilogue to the Arts Florissans, necessarily joining the springtime of the Arts inspired by Louis to that of Nature. (Gaétan Jarry)

Cyril Auvity / Ensemble Desmarest / Ronan Khalil MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers

Cyril Auvity heads the cast in a new recording of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers in a production being released by Glossa. Auvity is the lovelorn Orpheus who ventures, with his lyre, into the Underworld to plead with Pluto (Etienne Bazola) for the return of his Eurydice (Céline Scheen), struck down in her prime by a snakebite, being encouraged in his efforts by Proserpine, the wife of the ruler of Hades (Floriane Hasler).

This is a two-act chamber opera, written in 1686, and it is not known whether Charpentier ever composed any more music for the piece (the drama stops at a tantalizing moment in the well-known story). Even still, the composer appears to have invested substantial inspiration into the work, which will have been performed in front of the composer’s patron, Mademoiselle de Guise by a group of singers working within the limitations imposed by Jean- Baptiste Lully’s “musical monopoly” of the time.

For this recording, keyboard-player Ronan Khalil directs his Ensemble Desmarest. The demanding lead role of this entertainment continues Auvity’s strong current presence in French Baroque music-making – as well as his connection with Glossa. His Orpheus follows his previous Charpentier Stances du Cid release on the label, as well as appearances in operas by Campra, Destouches and Lully. Marc Trautmann both informs and entertains in his accompanying booklet essay. (Glossa)

Il Giardino d’Amore / Stefan Plewniak / Natalia Kawalek / Dawid Biwo AMOR SACRO AMOR PROFANO

 Love is crazy one may say, love you can not define,  love is all you need. Amor, Amore, l’Amour,  Je t’aime … so many ways to express something sweet inside of us, in some quiet secret and sacred part of our souls. Amor Sacro Amor Profano gently and softly leads us to this world where love write her own scenarios.

Amor Sacro Amor Profano features music of Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Lully, Charpentier, Stradella, Caresana, Corelii. 

Ensemble Correspondances / Sébastien Daucé MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) dedicated himself principally to composing sacred music for a pious duchess and a Jesuit chapel. Those works often smolder with inner embers, making him the musical equivalent of the French Caravaggist painter Georges de la Tour. His only full-scale opera was a flop (“too learned,” said the critics), but he also composed several short operas for the duchess’s entertainments. The most intriguing, La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers (The Descent of Orpheus into Hell), has been recorded several times before, but never as convincingly as in this luminous performance by Ensemble Correspondances (directed from the organ by Sébastien Daucé), in which historical scholarship deepens engaged musical instincts.

Top-drawer early-music chamber singers lead the cast, including the American light tenor Robert Getchell, affecting as grief-stricken Orphée, and the French bass Nicolas Brooymans, as malleable Pluton. The choral and instrumental work is exemplary, everywhere subtle in phrasing and fluid in embellishment; the nymphs and shepherds lamenting Eurydice’s death prove heartrending in the restrained articulation of their dissonances. This emotionally wrenching piece ends enigmatically, with Orpheus recovering Eurydice but just setting out on his journey with her back to the land of the living — a trip we know will be bumpy — while the Shades dance a ghostly goodbye. (James M. Keller)

Il Seminario Musicale / Gérard Lesne CHARPENTIER Trois histoires sacrées

Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed about 35 histoires sacrées, essentially the same genre as the oratorio that had been developed by Giacomo Carissimi in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century. The texts were most frequently taken from the Hebrew Bible (although one of the works here has as its subject the Nativity), and most are relatively brief; the three included here last from about 12 to 37 minutes. The histoires sacrées primarily consist of solos and dialogues in the style of recitatives, in which singers take the roles of the characters in the drama, with a chorus acting as narrator. Only occasionally do soloists have what is conventionally understood as an aria, and when they do, the arias are not an excuse for showy vocalism, but have the purpose of advancing the drama, albeit with heightened melodic lyricism. For the listener who can put aside the expectations of the late Baroque oratorios of Handel or J.S. Bach, these intimate and deeply expressive works are immensely rewarding. Charpentier had a real gift for creating and managing dramatic tension through music, and these little gems have the character of brief operas. The longest of the three, Mors Saülis et Jonathae, has developed characters with musical individuality and a poignant story with an elegant dramatic arc. The ensemble Il Seminario Musicale, founded and conducted by French countertenor Gérard Lesne, performs these works with consummate musicality and sensitive attention to the subtleties of the texts. The soloists, including Lesne himself, sing with clear understanding of middle Baroque French performance practice and with robust, clean tone, and persuasively convey the emotion and theatricality of the stories. Naïve's sound is intimate, but with a nice sense of spaciousness. (Stephen Eddins)

Ensemble Mare Nostrum / Andrea De Carlo LE CONCERT DES VIOLES

Whilst Italian composers had taken up the ‘modern' form of the sonata and adapted it to the violin at the beginning of the 17th century, French composers remained faithful to the principles of polyphonic music with their fantaisies that were still intended for ensembles of viols; the role of the violin in France at that time was still limited to providing music for dancing. Such knowledge of polyphony was demanded not only from composers of vocal music but also from organists, one of whom was Louis Couperin and who was also dessus de viole de la chambre du Roi. Our recording comes to a fitting conclusion with the last French work to be written for ensemble of viols: Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Concert à quatre parties de violes.

La Simphonie du Marais / Olivier Schneebeli / Ensemble Vocal Contrepoint MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Le Massacre des Innocents - Psaumes de David

In 1987, after he had been playing with European leading Baroque ensembles, Hugo Reyne decided to create his own ensemble.
In founding La Simphonie du Marais, he hoped to share his discoveries, joys and emotions with as many as possible and to breathe life into his numerous musical projects.
An ardent defender of the French musical patrimony from Lully to Rameau, he chose a name combining the word «Simphonie», the 17th - and 18th - century synonym for instrumental ensemble, and «Le Marais» one of the most beautiful areas in Paris, representative of the Baroque era. The name was quite appropriate as La Simphonie du Marais is now eventually based in Vendée, a region of western France, whose territory is bordered by marshes, namely Le Marais Breton and Le Marais Poitevin.
La Simphonie du Marais proposes programs - concerts and performances - of symphonic music, ballets, comedies-ballets and operas that can assemble up to 70 musicians : soloists, orchestra and choir.
Hugo Reyne is also very keen on the chamber and concertante repertoire for flute, as well as outdoor music with oboe ensemble. Thus, La Simphonie du Marais displays its multi-faceted talents, and is constantly able to propose new programs.

Les Paladins / Jérôme Correas MOLIÈRE À L'OPÉRA Stage music by JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY

With Molière à l’opéra Jérôme Correas and Les Paladins bring their much-admired combination of Baroque musical stylishness and use of the technique of “parlé-chanté”, adding colour and contrast to the sung text, to comédies-ballets composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier during the reign of Louis XIV. The musical and theatrical partnership involving Lully and Molière – they were dubbed “les deux Baptiste” – was one of the most invigorating ever entered into, marrying melody, words, acting and a shared hunger for fame.

The collaboration spanned ten works over a decade from 1661. Although Molière never provided the words for a Lully “opera”, the great dramatist clearly inspired the composer who was ten years his junior, in his later tragédies lyriques, a view upheld by the essayist for this recording, Elizabeth Giuliani. 

As well as presenting scenes from Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, this new Glossa recording draws on the humorous end of the Molière/Lully partnership in Monsieur de Pourceaugnac as well as more tragic airs from Psyché, by way of the trio grotesque from Charpentier’s score for Le Mariage forcé. In Luanda Siqueira, Jean-François Lombard, Jérôme Billy and Virgile Ancely, Jérôme Correas has brought together a versatile vocal quartet, alive to the daunting and frequently crazy characterizations demanded by Lully and Molière. (GLOSSA Music)