Critic’s Notebook: Christophe Rousset & Atys opens Resonanzen Festival in Vienna

Also reviewed for DiePresse: Bei den „Resonanzen“ geht abends die Sonne auf

A large dose of deligthfully elegant French baqroque from Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset to open the Vienna Konzerthaus' "Resonanzen" Festival. Perhaps almost too much of a good thing?

“Resonanzen” is the name of the annual early music festival of the Vienna Konzerthaus – now in its 32nd season. Each year has to have a motto, of course, to which the concerts are then most tenuously related. This year’s is: “The Planets”, which spans nine concerts -- the Sun and eight planets (no love for Pluto here, either) – and plenty events, movies, exhibitions (including a sort of petting zoo for old instruments).

The opening concert – “Sun” – was given to Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset, ionarts-favorites in performance and on record alike. They brought with them Lully’s Atys, which befits the sun-title, given that this “tragédie en musique” is also known as “the King’s opera” for having so entertained Louis XIV… the “Sun King”.

J.B.Lully Atys W.Christie, Les Arts Florissants Harmonia Mundi

J.B.Lully Atys C.Rousset, Les Talens Lyriques Chateau de Versailles Spectacles

I’m sure it was grand entertainment, but then Louis XIV would have had the benefit of experiencing the whole thing in a presumably lavish staging, with the accompanying ballet. And a buffet. Both would have nice on this occasion, too, because without either, Atys can get a bit long. That’s not particularly surprising, really, because Lully didn’t just readily use the formulaic musical language of his time, he created many of those formulas. And he runs with them. Further: Although there’s drama near the end of this “tragédie en musique”, most of the rest is a pastoral idyll that murmurs along like the gently flowing rivulets described in the libretto of Lully-regular, Philippe Quinault: “Flow, murmur, ye clear streams / only the sound of waters / lulls the sweetness of such delightful silence.” Try not falling asleep to that!

Everything in this opera has a tendency to become lovely, sweet, cloying. That may be part of the point, but I couldn’t help to wish for Rousset and Les Talens to really kick it up a notch. To be just a wee bit less tasteful, less elegant, less refined, less excellent. He didn’t have to go full-Pluhar. But maybe a little bit in that direction. Alas, to no avail. A little thunder in the nightmare-scene just wasn’t enough for nearly three hours of rather early French baroque. (Handel and Bach weren’t even a glimmer in their parents’ eyes, when the work was premiered in 1677 – at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, before the aforementioned excited King and an allegedly bored Parisian audience.)

Perhaps the hall was also a little big for the venture? The lack of immediacy of the accurate, pliable, but not very explosive orchestra, and the thin sound from Christophe Rousset’s own harpsichord suggested as much. The Chœur de Chambre de Namur, meanwhile, was not to be blamed: The fairly small, 21-headed, ensemble, had verve and diligence in spades and offered the greatest contrast when they entered the fray. The soloists, largely young and light-voiced, were equally fine – a little light on character but with considerable enthusiasm, led by Reinoud Van Mechelen’s experienced, cor-anglais-like tenor as Atys. Soprano Gwendoline Blondeel (Iris, Doris), too, stood out, for her round soprano voice with alto-undertones, a little unstable at first and then ever more dramatic and on-point.

It was William Christie who unearthed this work with his performances in the mid-80s and brought it back to the specialist conscience. His subsequent recording, long the only game in town, has become something of a something classic. And just this year, Christophe Rousset has added his own recording to the catalogue (the third, not counting DVDs). There’s a neat link between the two: Rousset was on second clavecin for Bill Christie, on the first recording, 37 years ago.

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Photo © Manuel Chemineau

Briefly Noted: Christophe Rousset (CD of the Month)

Le Manuscrit de Madame Théobon, C. Rousset (released on February 18, 2022) Aparté AP256 | 122'

The story behind this delightful disc is almost too good. First, Christophe Rousset is the musician, one of the most exciting harpsichordists playing today, last heard live in Washington in 2013. Second, he is playing two discs of music drawn from a newly rediscovered manuscript, now in the private collection of Rousset, who managed to acquire it from a bookseller over Ebay. Third, he is playing this wide array of brief pieces, arranged in the order of their key centers, on a harpischord made by Nicolas Dumont in 1704, around the same time that the music was likely copied. David Ley restored this instrument, which Rousset owns, from 2006 to 2016. It is one of only three Dumont harpsichords known to have survived.

Rousset has identified the manuscript's first owner as Lydie de Théobon, a one-time attendant on Queen Maria Theresa, wife of Louis XIV. The king began a two-year affair with her at the Château de Chambord in 1670, shortly before Molière and Lully premiered Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme there. The king's powerful mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, ousted Lydie from the queen's retinue in 1673, after which Lydie moved to the household of the Princesse Palatine, wife of the king's brother. She died at the Château de Marly in 1708, still in the orbit of the Sun-King. Although there is no record of her having been a great lover of music, the collection was likely compiled by her clavecin teachers.

The pieces copied into the book represent a sort of favorites list for the period. Music by prominent composers (Lully, d'Anglebert, Chambonnières) rubs shoulders with less known names like Ennemond Gaultier, Jacques Hardel, Nicolas Lebègue, and Pierre Gautier. Rousset identified some of the pieces because of his wide knowledge of the period, but others remain anonymous. Quite a few have been recorded here for the first time, at sessions in November 2020 at the Hôtel de l’Industrie in Paris. All are fairly brief, some as short as thirty seconds in duration. Rousset notes in his program notes that only one of the pieces in the manuscript ("Les Échos") explicitly requires a two-keyboard instrument, with the echo effect written out on the page.

The Dumont instrument has a big, brash sound, heard to orchestral effect in the Overture from La Grotte de Versailles, for example. That piece is one of many arrangements of excerpts from the most popular operas at the French court, including Armide and Atys. In a time without recordings, this was the only way to relive one's favorite past performances. Rousset also reveals the intimate side of this harpsichord, with delicate registrations in pieces like the "Sommeil d'Armide." A charming little Menuet by an unknown composer is recorded here for the first time, along with its "doubles," written-out ornamented repeats that give a glimpse into the ephemeral art of embellishment. As he often does, Rousset brings out many unexpected sounds, as in the "Branle des gueux," a pugnacious, folksy tune over a raucous drone pattern in left hand, made to twang almost like the timbre of a mouth harp.

Briefly Noted: Bewitched by Opera

L'opéra des opéras, Le Concert Spirituel, K. Deshayes, K. Watson, R. van Mechelen, H. Niquet (released on January 11, 2019) Alpha ALPHA442 | 74'10"

Do not let the silly cover art turn you away from this deserving new release led by French early music specialist Hervé Niquet. It is a selection of arias, choral numbers, and instrumental pieces from a range of operas by Rameau, Charpentier, Marais, Leclair, Campra, Francoeur, Mondonville, and names even more obscure. Not content with merely a random assortment of music, Benoît Dratwicki has chosen and arranged the pieces to create a new short opera, recorded in the Opéra Royal de Versailles in 2017. Dratwicki, the artistic director of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, took the idea from the gesture of Louis XIV when, in 1671, the Sun-King requested that Lully create a Ballet des ballets, bringing together excerpts from the 30-some ballets the composer had performed before his court.

The plot dreamed up for this makeshift opera suits, more or less, the excerpts from lots of different operas. A prince is in love with a princess, sung by tenor Reinoud van Mechelen and soprano Katherine Watson, respectively. The former has a sweet, sighing top well suited to the high-set haute-contre writing in French opera, while the latter sings with an edge sharpened by an active vibrato. The couple's love is thwarted by a wicked sorceress, sung with reedy, malevolent force by mezzo-soprano Karine Deshayes. (Hervé Niquet thought this triangle of characters similar to that found in the television show Bewitched, and thus the album cover was born.) If anything, the instrumental playing exceeds the singing in beauty, not least the magisterial Passacaille from Lully's Armide, which concludes the disc.

Recreating the Funeral Ceremony of Louis XIV

Louis XIV died 300 years ago, in 1715, and the Festival de Saint-Denis in the basilique des rois, where he and the other members of the French royal family were buried, marked the anniversary with a concert on June 8. This being France, where most people still hate the Bourbons, the royal funeral ceremony was recalled in a sort of theatrical way. One satirical epitaph from around the time of Louis XIV's death reads, "Ci-gît au milieu de l’église/Celui qui nous mit en chemise/Et s’il eût plus longtemps vécu/Il nous eût fait montrer le cul" (Here lies, in the middle of the church, / The one who took the shirt off our backs / And if he had lived any longer / He would have stripped our ass). Marie-Aude Roux has a review (De nouvelles funérailles pour le Roi-Soleil, June 17) for Le Monde (my translation):

No fewer than three organizations collaborated to produced this spectacle, in the form of a musico-theatrical cenotaph: the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, the Festival de Saint-Denis, and the Théâtre Gérard Philipe from Saint-Denis, with its new music-loving director, Jean Bellorini. Something like a pseudo-ritual, the theatrical presentation, elaborated with the help of Mathieu Coblentz, stuffed the music with royal funeral addresses taken from the funeral oration for Louis XIV, hagiography, and epitaphs, but also Biblical and philosophical texts from Job and Bossuet. Actors Sophie Botte and Samuel Glaumé, perched on a sort of funeral bier-stage, pedaled around on a bike trailer, shared a family meal, or lay down face up, like sarcophagus sculptures, on a bed draped with funeral shrouds. [...]

The unusual arrangement of the seats, lengthwise along the nave in two blocs facing each other, somewhat disoriented the audience. A long procession of men (the vocal ensemble Vox Cantoris) entered singing a plainchant responsory in use in the French court. Time came to a halt. Amassed on a riser at the entrance of the church, the musicians of the Chœur de chambre de Namur, La Cappella Mediterranea, and the Orchestre Millenium waited their turn: the magnificent funeral march from Lully's Alceste, conducted flamboyantly by Leonardo Garcia Alarcon.

Other musical selections included the Missa pro defunctis by Charles d’Helfer (1598-1661), music often performed in the Chapelle Royale and required for royal funerals at Saint-Denis until the end of the Ancien Régime, and some appropriate grands motets by Lully. Hopefully, a video or audio stream will become available.

Briefly Noted: Louis Le Prince

L. Le Prince, Missa Macula non est in te (inter alia), Le Concert Spirituel, H. Niquet (released on April 8, 2013) Glossa GCD921627 | 63'48"

Sacred music in 17th-century France has perhaps taken a back seat to the opera of that period. French conductor Hervé Niquet here makes an ingenious attempt to provide one glimpse into the Baroque chapelle -- French pronunciation of Latin and all -- with a disc of music from the period performed by all women's voices. The backbone of the program is the first recording of the Missa Macula non est in te, a setting of the Ordinary for six voices by Louis Le Prince, the maître de chapelle at the Cathedral of Lisieux, published in 1663, the only work by him known to survive. Proceeding from sources about practices relating to music performed by convents of nuns in the 17th century, Niquet has put together a sort of Mass-Office hybrid, with the five Mass movements surrounded by other pieces suited to different feast days but all for women's voices, here ten singers beautifully balanced in ensemble. The Mass, reconstructed from the score in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by scholars at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, is worth rediscovering, performed here with instruments (violon consort, bassoon, positive organ) doubling (and sometimes replacing) the vocal parts and captured in radiant sound in the resonant space of the church of Notre Dame du Liban in Paris. The trappings are no less charming, especially the opening motet, Gaudete fideles by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, an ecstatic tribute to St. Bernard, and Lully's rapturous motet O dulcissime domine, with a text that blurs the line just slightly between heavenly devotion and earthly lust. The other pieces, all by Charpentier and all quite charming, include a similarly contemplative Elevation motet, O pretiosum, and his florid setting of the Magnificat canticle, H. 75. Watch a few excerpts performed in the Chapelle Royale de Versailles.

Briefly Noted: Une fête baroque

Une fête baroque, N. Dessay, A. S. von Otter, S. Degout, P. Petibon, T. Lehtipuu, P. Jaroussky, S. Piau, R. Villazón, Le Concert d'Astrée, E. Haïm (released on March 13, 2012) Virgin 730799 2 | 154'11" [Listen]

This past December, Emmanuelle Haïm celebrated the 10-year anniversary of her historically informed performance ensemble, Le Concert d'Astrée. As a retrospective of the composers who have provided their greatest successes -- Rameau, Lully, Purcell, and especially Handel -- Haïm led a gala concert at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées, with a starry list of the singers who have worked with her over the last decade. Some excerpts from the concert were shown on in a Christmas Day broadcast on French television (see embedded video below), and this 2-CD set is the result of the live recording made in Paris. The thrill of this sort of event, with so many different singers, including many leading voices, performing only one or a few pieces is that all can throw themselves into their performances without worrying so much about safeguarding some vocal strength over the course of an entire operatic role. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is not the big guns that fire loudest: Natalie Dessay's Cleopatra, Philippe Jaroussky's Rinaldo, Anne Sofie von Otter's Phèdre, least of all R. Villazón's Bajazet.

Standout performances come from less expected places, like soprano Jaël Azzaretti in a high-flying avian duet with Alexis Kossenko on traverso in "Rossignols amoureux" or horn players with serious chops in the hunting aria "A la chasse," both from Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie. Ann Hallenberg adds extensive embellishments throughout "Lascia ch'io pianga" from Handel's Rinaldo, extending the harmony until it almost sounds like Fauré. Patricia Petibon performs a nutty La Folie, from Platée, driven mad by the sound of a portable (a brief spoken introduction, in which a cellphone rings on stage, is at the beginning of the track), adds all sorts of crazy ornaments. Sandrine Piau is plangent of tone in a beautiful rendition of "Piangerò la sorte mia" from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, again with affecting additions to the melodic line on the reprise of the A section. The only drawbacks of the live format are the amount of applause captured in the tracks, a few audience noises, and the fact that Haïm's excessively fast tempo leaves mezzo-soprano Renata Pokupić behind in the dust in Nerone's "Come nube che fugge dal vento" from Handel's Agrippina. One can excuse the obligatory Hallelujah chorus, complete with audience participation, with Christmas having been just around the corner, but not the Pájaros Perdidos-style Latin salsafication of Purcell's Sound the Trumpet.


(Note Haïm's unorthodox conducting style and read the comments on
this post about her being fired from the Opéra de Paris)

Glimmerglass: 'Armide'

Lully, Armide, G. Laurens, H. Crook, V. Gens, Collegium Vocale, La Chapelle Royale, P. Herreweghe

Charles T. Downey, Glimmerglass scores with a colorful, sumptuous “Armide” (The Classical Review, July 29)

Baroque opera, thankfully, is flourishing at the Glimmerglass Festival. The willingness to stage operas from the century and a half before Mozart — Monteverdi, Handel, Purcell, Gluck, and Cavalli have all been featured since 1994 — is part of what brought the company to greater prominence.

The name of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) was added to that list this year, with a sumptuously beautiful staging of Armide, heard Sunday afternoon, that was the high point of an otherwise mixed season. The production was imported from Toronto’s Opera Atelier and its fine Baroque ballet company, a smart decision for the realization of the ballet music, so crucial to the Lullian style.

[Continue reading]

Jean-Baptiste Lully, Armide (new critical edition by Lois Rosow, 2003)
With Peggy Kriha Dye, Colin Ainsworth, Atelier Ballet
Directed by Marshall Pynkoski
Glimmerglass Festival and Atelier Opera

This production continues through August 23.

SEE ALSO:
Heidi Waleson, Cooperstown Home Run (Wall Street Journal, July 31)

David Abrams, Lully: Armide (Musical Criticism, July 29)

Mike Silverman, Waterboarding 'Aida,' buoyant 'Music Man' (Associated Press, July 16)

Latest from Trio Settecento

This article was first published at The Classical Review on January 20, 2012.

A French Soirée, Trio Settecento (released on November 15, 2011) Cedille CDR 90000 129 | 78'55"

Rachel Barton Pine has made a name for herself as a soloist in the big Romantic violin concertos, in concert and on disc, but she stands out from other violinists of her generation for her willingness to play music off the beaten path.

She has made recordings of lesser-known concertos by Franz Clément and Joseph Joachim, for example, pairing them with more famous contemporaneous repertoire warhorses by Beethoven and Brahms respectively. Her latest solo disc, Capricho Latino, is a recital of Spanish and Latin American music for unaccompanied violin, some of it adapted from pieces originally created for other instruments, including the guitar. She also plays in a heavy metal band, of all things.

At a concert of French music from the grand siècle, in Washington last year, I learned of Barton Pine’s interest in Baroque music. With John Mark Rozendaal on viola da gamba and David Schrader on harpsichord, she formed Trio Settecento in 1996, an ensemble devoted to 17th- and 18th-century music. That concert program informed this third recording by the group and follows earlier discs of Italian and German music, all on the Cedille Records label.

Barton Pine’s interest in early music goes back quite a while: she won a Gold Medal at the J. S. Bach International Violin Competition in 1992, and has performed with the Newberry Consort, the Baroque Band, and the Chicago Baroque Ensemble, all historically informed performance ensembles. In this repertory, Barton Pine plays on a most unusual and historically appropriate instrument, a violin made by Nicolò Gagliano in 1770 and preserved with almost no historical alteration to the present day.

The most striking piece in the Washington concert, the elder Jean-Marie Leclair’s Violin Sonata in G major, closes this recording. It perfectly showcases Barton Pine’s astounding virtuosity (Leclair was himself a virtuoso violinist), and shows her handling the devilish multiple-stop writing used to evoke trio sonata texture as if she were creating the sound of two violins on a single instrument.

Her Trio Settecento colleagues mostly serve as backup to Barton Pine’s fireworks, especially in the Leclair piece. It is combined with a fiery D minor Sonata by Jean-Féry Rebel, François Couperin’s Troisième Concert (distinguished by its folksy ‘Muzette’, a lively dance imitating the sound of a medieval bagpipe), and Jean-Philippe Rameau’s rollicking, harpsichord-centered Quatrième Concert, which includes a depiction of the chaos of the composer’s home, the slapstick lazzi (‘jokes’) of the Italian commedia dell’arte, and the prattling chatter of an indiscreet gossip.

John Mark Rozendaal sounds in better form on the disc than he did live, perhaps because he plays here on a superior bass viol from the 18th century (made by Jean Ouvrard in 1743). The famous gamba solo La Guitare, by the virtuoso Marin Marais, is quite beautiful. The Marais pieces are among several excerpts grouped together under the title of Divertissement representing the vast body of music composed for the royal ear, which includes dances from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Ballet Royal de Flore (the last court ballet in which Louis XIV personally took part as a dancer in 1669), and suite movements by François Couperin and Marais. Each of these movements strikes a mood, often in the rhythmic pattern and tempo range of a specific dance style, and holds the ear entranced for their short durations.

The exception is Marais’ delightful Chaconne, the longest of three examples of the genre, based on a repeated bass ostinato pattern, one of the most iconic compositional types of the French baroque. Along with the chaconnes, the two sarabandes, both from concerts (suites) by Couperin, offer some of the most delectable listening on this generally savory disc.

In a personal note in the CD booklet, accompanying thoughtful program notes penned by Rozendaal, Barton Pine describes her labors in finding and maintaining appropriate intonation on a recording in which the pitch is set at A=392 (somewhat similar to a modern G-natural). “Listening to the glorious, ornate, and refined music of the French Baroque,” she writes, “is like stepping into a fantasy world of elegance and opulence.”

Indeed, Barton Pine’s exquisite intonation is one of the reasons listening to her is so rewarding. To further complicate matters, the harpsichord (a 1983 Lawrence G. Eckstein copy of a Dumont-Taskin instrument, with a charming lute stop, heard in the Couperin Sicilienne) has been tuned in an unequal temperament.

The Trio Settecento threesome, accustomed to one another from years of playing together, form a pleasing, unified whole, with careful, historically based attention given to matters of phrasing and ornamentation.

Opera Lafayette

Charles T. Downey, At Kennedy Center, duo adds to Opera Lafayette’s cachet
Washington Post, October 26, 2011

Lambert (et al.), Airs de cour, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt [MP3]

One can count on Opera Lafayette to choose lesser-known but worthwhile music and to perform it beautifully. This was true Monday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, when it performed an assortment of French and Italian music for solos and duets, featuring two of the ensemble’s favorite guest singers.

Soprano Gaële Le Roi and tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt were sympathetically matched in the duets, such as the lovely “Qu’il sait peu son malheur” from Lully’s “Atys,” two never-overbearing voices that blended with and supported each other.

Fouchécourt was at his best in the comic solos, camping it up in the cross-dressed role of the old nurse Berenice, in excerpts from Cavalli’s “Ipermestra,” an opera rediscovered at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2006. Le Roi, who is a formidable singing actress, excelled in the dramatic recitatives for Galatea, bewailing the death of Acis in “La Galatea” by Loreto Vittori. [Continue reading]

SEE ALSO:
Cavalli, Ipermestra (performed at the Utrecht Early Music Festival in 2006) [Part 1 | Part 2]

Trio Settecento at Dumbarton Oaks

Trio Settecento: A German Bouquet An Italian Sojourn

This review is an Ionarts exclusive.

We have been admirers of the playing of violinist Rachel Barton Pine since hearing her in Washington, twice, in 2006. In addition to the music we have already heard her play, it turns out that Barton Pine also has an interest in the Baroque violin repertory. She plays with a group called Trio Settecento, which made its Washington debut on Sunday night in a refined concert featuring music by French composers of the grand siècle. This French program, called A French Soirée, will be released on a disc this fall by Cedille, continuing a recent series of albums that has featured selections of German and Italian music.

The first half began with a mélange of music for the combination of violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord, mostly dances from the 17th century, by Lully, Couperin, and Marin Marais. In this repertory, Barton Pine plays on a most unusual and historically appropriate instrument, a violin made by Nicolò Gagliano in 1770 and preserved with almost no historical alteration to the present day. Gagliano's father, Alessandro, trained in the Cremonese workshops of Amati and Stradivari, and he founded a Neapolitan tradition of violin making. The way she played these works, with a slender and precise tone, sweet and meaty but never forced, is another indication of one of the best results of the historically informed performance movement: real violin virtuosos combined with historical instruments and techniques make for more exciting renditions than those by some of the earlier specialists. (Viktoria Mullova also comes to mind.) Barton Pine's tuning was impeccable, and her left hand remarkably agile even as she added little embellishments to already florid lines. Standout pieces in the set included a forlorn sarabande (taken from Couperin's Concerts royaux) and a chromatically rich chaconne by Marais.

John Mark Rozendaal was a talented partner to Barton Pine on the gamba, often in rhythmic dialogue with her. In the pieces that featured him as a soloist, as in the technically demanding Les guitares by Marais, one noticed shortcomings more than being wowed by virtuosity, with some infelicities of intonation on the high strings and finger tangles here and there. At the harpsichord (a William Dowd copy of an instrument made by Blanchet), David Schrader was rigorous and reliable but not all that noteworthy, until he had more to work with in the demanding pieces by Rameau, from the Deuxième Concert, and Antoine Forqueray's dazzling harpsichord solo La Leclair, an evocation of the violin virtuoso whose work concluded the concert. For the most part, though, this was the Rachel Barton Pine show, nowhere more than in the astounding performance of Leclair's G major violin sonata (op. 3, no. 1). In all of the movements except the elegiac Largo, Leclair seemed to be trying to recreate the texture of the trio sonata in this work -- with both of the violin parts taken by the one violinist in extremely difficult double stops. Barton Pine treated these movements as the contrapuntal tour de force they were, giving both of the lines independence and beauty.

The next concerts on the Friends of Music series at Dumbarton Oaks will feature the Altenberg Trio from Vienna (March 27 and 28).

Celebrating 'Atys': Arts Still Flourishing

Lully, Atys, G. de Mey, G. Laurens, A. Mellon, Les Arts Florissants, W. Christie (re-released on September 8, 2009) Harmonia Mundi HML 5901257-59 Online score: Atys, 2d ed. (1708)

In the 1970s, a young American musician named William Christie, having received degrees at Harvard and Yale, decided to move to France. His goal was to pursue an interest in the reconstruction of Baroque music in historically informed performance, but moving to France also helped Christie avoid being drafted into the war in Vietnam, to which he was vehemently opposed. In 1979, in an event whose 30th anniversary is being celebrated with this re-release, Christie founded a group of promising musicians who shared his interests, under the name Les Arts Florissants. He took the name from one of his favorite operas, by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, in which (surely not coincidentally for Christie) the arts are shown threatened by war but prospering under the reign of La Paix. The new ensemble scored a major success in 1984 with a landmark recording of Charpentier's stunning Médée (the second version Christie did, in the 1990s, helped introduce singers like Mark Padmore and Lorraine Hunt to the world). Suddenly, it became clear that these seemingly unwieldy operas, long relegated to the junk heap of music history, still had considerable appeal for audiences.

Through Charpentier Christie came to work on the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, who jealously drove Charpentier out of the opera business. For the 300th anniversary of Lully's death, in 1987, Christie was chosen to help create a staged production of one of the composer's tragédies en musique at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Christie chose Atys (1676), according to him, "for its libretto -- it was the purity and the absolute beauty of the text that attracted me." Musicologist Jean-Paul Montagnier, who wrote the liner essay for this anniversary edition of the recording, recalls the performance thus:

Like all those present in the auditorium of the Opéra-Comique [that day], I believe I can state that the production of Atys by Jean-Marie Villégier (director), Carlo Tommasi (designer), Patrice Cauchetier (costumes), Francine Lancelot and her company Ris et Danceries (choreography) and William Christie and his Arts Florissants was an undisputed and unprecedented triumph which enabled the public to rediscover and gain a lasting appreciation of a work forgotten since its previous performances at Fontainebleau in November 1753, and more generally to rediscover a genre long regarded with a certain dignified condescendence.

The New York Times even sent John Rockwell to review the event ('Atys', by Lully, in Paris, January 18, 1987), and Andrew Porter described a later performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music as "one of the most important productions of our day; a revelation of what early opera can offer to a modern audience when inspiring direction, skilful, stylish performers, and ample funds conspire" (Alan Rich had similar praise, although there were some critical reservations about cuts and other directorial changes).

In the weeks after that performance, Christie and his forces laid down this historic recording, in the studio of La Maison de Radio France. It has been reissued a couple times, always remaining available, but this anniversary edition is the most affordable and deluxe version yet, with reproductions of a 17th-century copy of the libretto printed in parallel with the English and German translations. This 20-year-old recording still sounds gorgeous, a testament to Christie's musical vision, so clearly captured in sound during his group's first decade. The ensemble's rhythmic cohesion is so solid, even as the many dance rhythms that pervade Lully's music are given balletic lilt. The recitative, which in Lully's trademark style constantly shifts back and forth with more metered arioso-like sections, is flexible and speech-like, accompanied with a varied palette of instruments, the harmonies realized by various combinations of harpsichord, lute, theorbo, archlute, piccolo lute, and guitar. The winds are remarkably varied in the way the parts are assigned to different sections, with five recorder players (heard to hypnotizing effect in the famous sommeil scene in Act III) and eight double reeds, spread among oboes, alto oboes (tailles d'hautbois), and bassoons.

The cast is generally lovely, although one could imagine a slightly prettier, purer voice for Atys than Guy de Mey. Agnès Mellon has an affecting, rarefied sound as Sangaride, who falls in love with Atys. As the domineering goddess Cybèle, Guillemette has the same grainy, puissant edge to her tone that gave her such success as other forceful women, like her spectacular Armide for Philippe Herreweghe and as recently as Pulcheria in the new recording of Vivaldi's Atenaide. Since a critical edition has still not been published in the Lully complete works edition, in progress under Herbert Schneider and Jérôme de La Gorce for Georg Olms Verlag, the performers worked from original sources, apparently with advice from Schneider himself and the eminent French musicologist Jean Duron, among others. The version of the score, as far as I can tell, is complete or nearly so, with plenty of dance music included throughout the opera.


Watch more YouTube videos of telecast of 1987 production of Atys
Lully's librettist, Philippe Quinault, adapted one of the stranger stories of Greek mythology, that of Cybele and Attis, given in an account of an exotic cult by Pausanias (Guide to Greece, 7.17.9-13). The Phrygian earth mother goddess, Cybele, became part of the Greek pantheon, along with her son, Attis, who according to some versions of the story was born of the male part of Cybele's formerly hermaphroditic self. As Ovid retold the story in Fasti (fourth chapter, on the feasts of April), which was likely Quinault's main source, the goddess fell in love with a handsome Phrygian boy and bound him to serve in her temple. When he disobeyed the command to keep himself chaste for the goddess, Cybele drove him mad, causing him to castrate himself. In imitation of Attis, some of Cybele's male followers, the Corybantes, supposedly castrated themselves, a fate abhorred by Catullus in Carmen LXIII. Stricken with remorse for Attis, Cybele changed him into a pine tree, mentioned by Ovid in his take on the Orpheus legend in Metamorphoses (link to Anthony S. Kline's online translation, Book X).

Quinault and Lully leave out the castration part of the story, having the madness inflicted by Cybèle instead cause Atys to murder Sangaride. When he realizes what he has done, he takes his own life, leading Cybèle to transform him into a pine tree. With the question of genital self-mutilation out of the way, the main crisis of the opera is the mismatch of the couples, the two young lovers, Atys and Sangaride, forced into alliances with more important, older partners, Cybèle and Célénus, respectively. This issue of age-disparate relationships had some resonance with 17th-century society, and it was even seized upon in a parody of the opera by Fuzelier and Dorneval at the 1726 revival as La grand-mère amoureuse.

One final point about Christie's achievements over the last thirty years: surveying the list of names of the musicians who participated in this recording, it is clear that Christie has created not only one of the most distinguished discographies in the early music movement. He has also taught and mentored many musicians who have gone on to lauded careers: Bernard Deletré, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, and Véronique Gens all sang minor roles; Christophe Rousset played the harpsichord in the orchestra's Petit Chœur, with Stephan Stubbs on lute; John Holloway sat first violin and played the ritournelle solos; Bruno Cocset was somewhere near the middle of the basse de violon section; Marc Minkowski played third bassoon; and Hervé Niquet can be heard in the tenor section of the chorus.

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Queyras and Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia

Haydn, Cello Concertos, J.-G. Queyras, Freiburger Barockorchester

A fall season pleasingly plein de French music continued at La Maison Française on Tuesday night, with a concert by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. The high point of the program turned out, as expected, to be the performance of French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras as soloist in the C major cello concerto (Hob. VIIb:1) by Haydn. Queyras's recording of the Haydn concertos on a Baroque instrument, made a few years ago with the Freiburger Barockorchester, was glowingly received, and this had the same decorous, genteel sound. By comparison to the last performance of the work in our ears, that of Pieter Wispelwey with the Australian Chamber Orchestra last year, it was that much more pleasant to hear for being far less robust and rustic. Queyras's tone, by no means tepid, was distinguished by warmth more than force. He took a crisp approach, with admirable lightness in off-the-string sections and sparing vibrato even high on the A string. He also tended to smooth out the multi-stops and added many pleasing but minor embellishments.

Queyras even created his own cadenza for the first movement, one which wryly incorporated, with seamless ingenuity, the opening notes of La Marseillaise as a tribute to his concitoyens in the embassy that sits, after all, on French soil. After a ravishing and wholly unaffected second movement, in which the orchestra did a good job of mostly just staying out of the way, the group launched into a darting, very fast rendition of the third movement. Unfortunately, the house lights coming up early appeared to convince the audience, full but not to capacity, to stop applauding, which deprived us of a solo encore. Tant pis pour nous!

Other Reviews: David Patrick Stearns, Pianist Tharaud, cellist Queyras hit unexpected marks (Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29)

The COOP did not exactly measure up to the Freiburger Barockorchester, but the intentions behind the group's performance were rather different. The concerto and another Haydn selection, Symphony No. 8 (programmed for the first time in the ensemble's history), showed the group in the best light. Le Soir, as it is known (the evening part of a trilogy devoted to the times of day), featured well-played solos from the string principals and especially the principal flute in the first movement. The menuetto, taken at a fairly rapid pace, was jolly, with a decent rendition of the intentionally absurd solo for double-bass. The tempest in the fourth movement rollicked with buzzing tremolos.

The smiles among the players in the Haydn selections showed a preference for this music, reinforced by the unnuanced, bland sound they produced on the French selections, two Rameau arrangements and the ballet suite from Lully's Le Triomphe de l'Amour. Normally, I would welcome the chance to hear that much Lully, but what I did hear (I arrived late, through a misreading of the start time) fell flat and colorless. Part of the blame goes to guest conductor Rudolf Werthen, standing in for the ensemble's relatively new music director, Ignat Solzhenitsyn (who happens to be a son of the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and teaches piano at the Curtis Institute). Persistent intonation clashes, especially in the violin section, seemed due only to uncharacteristic carelessness.

The next concert at La Maison Française will feature Opera Lafayette in yet more Haydn, cantatas performed by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Houtzeel, as well as music by Handel, who will also be the focus of an important anniversary in 2009.

Tafelmusik Takes Yet Another Shape

Tafelmusik, photo by Cylla von Tiedemann

To kick off the Ionarts Baroque Weekend™, the superlative, Toronto-based historically informed performance (HIP) ensemble Tafelmusik gave an outstanding concert in the Barns at Wolf Trap on Friday night. The program sewed together some 18th-century favorites, with legends drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses as a common thread. To provide the seams, Canadian actor R. H. Thomson narrated the evening, from a script by the group's bass player, Alison Mackay, that related six stories from Ovid. The metaphor could apply both to a Baroque tapestry or to a Frankenstein monster, and at one point or another both seemed to apply, but by far the former.

Ovid was the most common source of mythological legends in the 17th and 18th centuries, and his stories were commonly adapted as operas in the Baroque period, mined here not for vocal music but for instrumental dance pieces. The evening began with Rameau's Castor et Pollux, two pieces from the astrological ballet that concludes the opera, as the twin brothers are placed in the heavens as the constellation Gemini. A Tambourin displayed the unity of articulation among the dozen or so core players of Tafelmusik, under the animating bow of music director Jeanne Lamon, who sits as concertmaster. The drum beat was provided ably by a violinist magically transformed into a percussionist.

Nicolas Poussin, Echo and Narcissus, 1628-30, Musée du Louvre (with thanks to Web Gallery of Art)

The next set provided a chance to compare that piece with a more rustic Tambourin from Lully's Acis et Galatée, from 1686 (last heard from Opera Lafayette in 2005 and reviewed on disc from Les Musiciens du Louvre). Most satisfyingly, Tafelmusik plays dance music as if it were for dancing, with weight where it should be and lightness likewise. The stunning Passacaille, which concludes this opera, was played with finesse and urgency, never allowing the structural repetition of the form to overburden the listener. Rameau's overtures are almost always worthy listening, and Tafelmusik's performance of the overture from Pygmalion (recorded on the recently recommended survey by Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques) proved that estimation true. The remaining selections, especially the vigorous Contredanse for Pygmalion's wedding dance with the Graces, were just as finely etched. The closing set, from Marin Marais's Alcione, was the least familiar. Its lusty Marche pour les Matelots, for the sailors of Ceyx's ship, was matched by a booming Tempeste for the storm that sank it. Marais showed himself the master student of his teacher, Lully, in an extended Chaconne and rousing Tambourin.

In some cases, Ovid merely provided a link to gather non-operatic music into groups, like the set of echo pieces, a favorite Baroque device, that accompanied the Echo and Narcissus section. The same was true of the Contest of Pan and Apollo, little more than an excuse to bring together two perennial favorites, Alessandro Marcello's D minor oboe concerto and Vivaldi's Summer concerto from The Four Seasons. Little matter, since the solo performances, by oboist John Abberger and violinist Julia Wedman, were both stylistically sensitive and beautifully embellished. In fact, the only criticism one could make of this excellent program was that the narration was not made up simply of readings of Ovid's poems. The desired effect, according to Mackay, was to render the stories as directly as possible, but it made the whole affair more prosaic than poetic as a side-effect. A minor complaint, to be sure.

Coming up next month, the Gryphon Trio will play in the Barns at Wolf Trap (March 7, 8 pm).

Lully's American Thésée

Available at Amazon: Lully, Thésée, Boston Early Music Festival, H. Crook, L. Pudwell, P. O'Dette (June 26, 2007)

Last January, we reviewed a recital by lutenist Paul O'Dette and soprano Ellen Hargis at the National Gallery of Art. Both are regular participants in the Boston Early Music Festival, where they worked together on this production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Thésée, in 2001. A co-production with Radio Bremen brought the performers to Germany, where this recording was made last September, somewhat surprisingly the only version of the opera now available. The opera was premiered at St.-Germain-en-Laye in 1675, although its prologue is set in the relatively new château of Versailles (which is one way to signal that the listener should read the opera in terms of the life of Louis XIV). The libretto by Philippe Quinault is one of the stranger works of literature, but the story is based upon Plutarch and Ovid, with a few extra characters thrown in to make it read like 17th-century French drama.

Two mythological characters fresh from disastrous romantic liaisons become entangled with one another. The vengeful sorceress Medea, having just gotten murderously even with the unfaithful Jason, falls in love with her later husband's son, Theseus, who has returned to Athens after killing the Minotaur and abandoning Ariadne. (This family history does not get any healthier, since Theseus's son Hippolytus was killed in an accident after he rejected the advances of his stepmother, Phaedra.) As unlikely as the story is for operatic treatment, Handel's later opera Teseo uses a libretto that is basically Quinault's text translated into Italian. After its premiere at St.-Germain-en-Laye in 1675, Thésée was one of Lully's most successful operas, receiving numerous revivals in Paris late into the 18th century. One can actually consult the entire score, from its first printing, online.

Calyx krater (with Medea in her chariot), c. 400 B.C. Cleveland Museum of Art

In our time, the opera has largely been forgotten, except for a few performances, led by William Christie as part of the Ambronay Festival. Also, Emmanuelle Haïm and Le Concert d'Astrée will present a staged production at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées this February and at the Opéra de Lille in March, with Jean-Louis Martinoty directing and Anne Sofie von Otter as Médée. The Boston instrumental forces have a unified and propelled sound (as in the concluding Chaconne), directed gracefully from the theorbo section by Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. Any orchestra that has two musette players (Jean-Christophe Maillard and François Lazarevitch) is going to have some vibrant colors available. Laura Pudwell snarls and menaces as Médée, with a thick tone and percussive diction, while experienced Baroque tenor Howard Crook continues to impress with his flexible voice as Thésée. The bass of Harry van der Kamp (Ægée), of the same age as Crook, has aged less gracefully. Ellen Hargis's Æglé is good, but perhaps lacks the naïve shimmer proper to the role.

The test of a recording's merit is generally in the supporting voices, which here are hit-and-miss, with some strained and pushed sounds, as well as occasional lapses in French pronunciation. Suzie LeBlanc (Cleone) and Aaron Sheehan (Un plaisir and other minor roles), both of whom we have reviewed live in recent years, have pleasant turns. It seems unlikely that this recording, as good as it is, will not be bettered by one conducted by either William Christie or Emmanuelle Haïm (the latter seems a quite likely eventuality). However, as that has not yet happened, this 3-CD set is most welcome, and it is complete, with all of the charming dance music (and a liner essay on the dance music by respected scholar Rebecca Harris-Warwick).

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Lully's Armide Sells out in Maryland

Classical Music can’t be all that dead – or even sick – if you can show a relatively obscure French baroque opera on a freezing cold Sunday afternoon on the inconveniently located outskirts of the District of Columbia and do it to a full house. Well over 2000 ears perked to hear Opera Lafayette present Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide (on Torquato Tasso's oft set Gerusalemme liberata) under the direction of Ryan Brown. Even if (French) baroque opera can get long (maybe 45 minutes longer than would have been ideal for this otherwise rapt listener) and a tad repetitive, no one will have regretted the long trip to Maryland University’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Performed in a concert version but with baroque dance interludes (or danced ‘commentary’, so to speak – provided by the New York Baroque Dance Company), excellently played by the period orchestra (the strings a little shallow sounding, if a point of criticism must be found), and splendidly sung by its cast, Armide was as close as the baroque opera world gets to an ‘event’ in this town. The title role was taken by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Houtzeel who calls a fiercely trained, steeled, and concentrated veteran voice her own – a voice that could eat all the others on stage for breakfast… which is not to say that it was more beautiful or pleasant than, for example Ms. Dubrow’s soprano: a rich, full, pleasantly round instrument, well suited to French; a voice that has not yet had its naturalness trained out of it. An unrelated, mild struggle was faintly audible at times, but hardly distracted from her contributions (La Sagesse, Sidonie, Mélisse) which contrasted so nicely with Ms. Houtzeel’s. The latter’s voice filled the barn-like Elsie & Marvin Dekelboum Concert Hall that it would not allow for the church effect that smaller voices were affected with. Veteran singer Ann Monoyios (La Glorie, Phénice, Lucinde) had this natural resonance added to her clear tone.


François Loup (Hidarot, Ubalde) is a natural choice for such undertakings as Armide in this region: Like a veteran sweeper in football, he can get the desired results with a fraction of the effort that younger colleagues would have to invest. His (musical) intelligence and experience allow him to sing his parts more marvelously than the voice he still has (impressive in its own right) alone would allow for. Robert Getchell’s Renaud was sturdy and unassailable – all in a role that does not quite offer the same opportunities to sparkle as those of his female colleagues. The same can be said about Tony Boutté’s “Danish Knight” and William Sharp’s Artémidore and his “Hate”, La Haine. The UMD students Darren Perry, Tara McCredie, Adria McCulloch, and Eric Sampson made the most of their small parts as Aronte, a nymph, a shepherdess, and that “fortunate lover”.

Other Reviews: Tim Page, 'Armide' the Obscure: Well Worth Bringing to Light (Washington Post, February 5) Charles T. Downey, Armide Project: Lully (DCist, February 5)

The dances, based on known patterns of baroque dance and choreographed by artistic director Catherine Turocy were delicate and graceful beyond what one might expect, in earnest ignorance, from prologues, preludes, and interspersed orchestral dances padded with baroque dancing. Elaborate costumes further helped add much appreciated color to this concert-performance which gave much reason to look forward to the upcoming performances of Gluck’s Armide, fully staged, at the Clarice Smith Center’s Kay Theatre in April.

Marc Minkowski Releases

Since forming his historically informed performance (HIP) ensemble, Les Musiciens du Louvre, in the 1980s conductor Marc Minkowski has released a stunning number of excellent recordings, many of which have set the benchmark for performance of 17th- and 18th-century music. Quite naturally, the group has specialized in French composers of le grand siècle, although they have made excellent recordings of Handel operas, too, and recently a few forays into other territory, including Mozart and even Berlioz, Méhul, and Offenbach.

Available at Amazon: Rameau, Hippolyte et Aricie, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Véronique Gens, Bernarda Fink, Laurent Naouri, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Ensemble Vocal Sagittarius, Marc Minkowski (first released 1995, re-released September 2006)

Perhaps the best work that Minkowski and other French conductors, especially William Christie (an honorary citizen of France), have done is give the music of Jean-Philippe Rameau the recordings it deserves. Hippolyte et Aricie was the first major Rameau opera that Minkowski released, in this live recording made in June 1994 at the Opéra Royal in Versailles. Graham Sadler's work on the new critical edition of the works of Rameau has revealed the misconceptions, even fabrications, of the composer's operas and given us guidance on the multiple versions of most of them. In the excellent liner notes, including an essay by none other than Graham Sadler, Minkowski explains how he arrived at the rather complete form of the score recorded here, with some parts that have often been cut from Hippolyte restored. The dance music in this opera is so charming, like the sailors' ballet in Act III (in which we can hear the frenzied clicking of oboe machinery in one of the rigaudons), I would hate not to have it.

The vocal casting is superb, with Jean-Paul Fouchécourt and Véronique Gens in excellent voice as the eponymous lovers. Some of the music is just too good to believe, as in Aricie's opening aria of Act I ("Temple sacré"), which is luscious, gentle, seductive, and harmonically daring. Although some of the minor roles are merely good, Bernarda Fink has a superlative turn as Phèdre, the jealous stepmother (a review of her Sesto with René Jacobs in La Clemenza di Tito is forthcoming), and Laurent Naouri is appropriately solemn as the three gods, Pluton, Neptune, and Jupiter. There are some tracks that could have benefitted from an alternate take, if this were not a live recording. The thunder scene of Diana's anger in Act I, for example, is uneven, with the many runs jumbled by instruments and voices, but the booming percussion and thunder screen makes it thrilling. This set is certainly worth owning, especially since its only competition -- Les Arts Florissants with Mark Padmore and one Lorraine Hunt as Phèdre -- appears to be mostly unavailable in the United States (still carried by Amazon UK). Janet Baker's historic recording is a curiosity worth finding if you can.

Lully, Acis et Galatée, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Véronique Gens, Mireille Delunsch, Howard Crook, Laurent Naouri, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (first released 1998, re-released September 12, 2006)

Opera Lafayette gave a live performance of Jean-Baptiste Lully's final opera, Acis et Galatée, here last year. For this 1996 live recording in the Salle Wagram in Paris, Minkowski reunited the two lead singers from Hippolyte et Aricie, with Fouchécourt and Gens singing equally well in these title roles, and Laurent Naouri again, in the memorable role of the cyclops, Polyphème. First released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1998, Archiv has recently given it a most welcome re-release. Fouchécourt has the sweetest high range, perfectly suited to this kind of music, and Gens gives a moving performance in the little scena in Act III, after Acis is fatally crushed by the rock thrown by the cyclops, in alternation with instrumental passages. The music, especially the chaconne and passacaille movements, is exquisite, Lully at the height of his craft. The instrumental performance here is equal to the vocal, with tight, rhythmically activated readings of all the dance pieces, often with the phrase shapes highlighted crisply by percussion.

Minkowski again shows his musicological connections, with the essay in this booklet by Jérôme de La Gorce (and English translations by Graham Sadler). If you are used to the serious tone of Lully's tragic operas, this work is in a lighter pastoral style, and in it, as La Gorce put it in his essay, Lully rediscovered shortly before his death the comic mode he had when he collaborated with Molière. The role of Polyphemus, sung with appropriate bluster and an odd accent by Naouri, is particularly funny: the Act II entrance of the cyclops is preceded by a heavy-footed march, which Minkowski has punctuated by a silly panpipe signal, almost like a slide whistle. Besides all of its strengths (there are not even any "live recording" glitches to be regretted here), this is the only complete recording of the opera, and it is worth owning.

Rameau, Une symphonie imaginaire, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (released on June 14, 2005)

Rameau, Les Boréades, Les Arts Florissants

Alex Ross praised Minkowski's most recent Rameau disc, Une symphonie imaginaire, when it was released and listed it on his Top 10 List of 2005 recordings. I missed the recording at the time, but it has recently crossed my desk and has become favorite listening, for either focused appreciation or background for cooking dinner. The concept is simple and ingenious: Rameau was universally praised for the symphonic pieces in his operas but wrote almost no stand-alone music for orchestra alone. Minkowski stitches together his imaginary Rameau symphony from various places, including a ritournelle from Hippolyte et Aricie, dance movements from several operas and ballets, and arias with the vocal parts artfully removed. One particularly beautiful example of the latter is "Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux" from Castor et Pollux, which recently appeared in an opera scene in Sofia Coppola's latest movie, Marie-Antoinette (sound taken from the excellent recording by Les Arts Florissants). There is even a modern orchestral transcription of Rameau's famous piece for keyboard, La Poule (The hen). Most satisfying are several pieces drawn from Les Boréades, a little-known tragic opera published posthumously. John Eliot Gardner has recorded it, but I am now most interested in seeing the DVD, released in 2004, of a performance of the opera in Paris by Les Arts Florissants, with Barbara Bonney and none other than Laurent Naouri again.

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Comédies-Ballets in Paris

William Christie has struck again. With his Baroque performance group, Les Arts Florissants (see my review of their last concert in Washington), he is performing two of the Molière-Lully comédies-ballets, L'Amour médecin and Le Sicilien, ou l'Amour peintre, staged by Jean-Marie Villégier and Jonathan Duverger, at the Comédie-Française (through July 24). An article (Molière ciselé, Lully laid [Chiseled Molière, ugly Lully], April 22) by Eric Dahan for Libération has the goods (my translation):

The French have an American to thank for having rediscovered Lully's music. It was 1987, and thanks to an Atys staged by Jean-Marie Villégier, William Christie and his group Les Arts florissants brought their Baroque musicological revolution to the public. Since then, the team has offered, on a reduced scale, Les Métamorphoses de Psyché at the Opéra-Comique, marked with th same ideal mixture of dramatic intelligence and vocal and musical refinement. [...]

This performance is diametrically opposed to the Bourgeois Gentilhomme presented last year by Vincent Dumestre, in a candlelit setting. Next to that production, an exemplar of coherence and poetry, the stylistic patchwork seen and heard at the Place du Palais-Royal seems quite vulgar. This is not Laurent Pelly. Between the atrocious sets of L'Amour médecin (Kokkos-style cutouts lit unimaginately), the actors playing in such a modern way, the choreography (credited to Jean Guizerix and Wilfride Piolet, two former dance stars at the Opéra), and the approximative vocal interpretations, one is not really sure what to make of it. As directed by Christie from the harpsichord, however, the ten players from Les Arts Florissants at least hold their own and sound magnificent.

Le Sicilien fares at least somewhat better. Villégier transposes the action to the 1930s and borrows images from MGM musical comedies of the period. It sounds anachronistic, but also quite Baroque in its extravagance.

Lully's Acis et Galatée

Newspaper Review: Tim Page, Opera Lafayette's 'Acis et Galatee': Lush and Lovely (Washington Post, February 22): note that the photo included with that article is from a previous production

As I mentioned last month, I met the Executive Director of Opera Lafayette at a concert. I was all too happy to follow through on her invitation to see their newest production yesterday, Jean-Baptiste Lully's Acis et Galatée. It was the last operatic work that Lully completed, and it was premiered on September 6, 1686, at the Château d'Anet, in the same year as Lully's greatest success, Armide, and shortly before he died. Opera Lafayette did not really mount a production of the opera at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, at the University of Maryland. This was a concert performance of Lully's pastorale héroïque, with the chorus and soloists behind music stands in two rings behind the orchestra. What did add immeasurably to this arrangement was Catherine Turocy and four other dancers from her New York Baroque Dance Company, in costumes and with a few props. Opera Lafayette and the slate of top-tier Baroque singers it brought together for this performance had attracted a nearly full house, which listened to some introductory remarks from the Clarice Smith Center's Executive Director.

The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, specifically from the end of Book 13. Acis (sung by experienced Baroque tenor Howard Crook) falls in love with a sea nymph, Galatea, daughter of Neptune (soprano Gaële Le Roi, in a cream gown with a scallop motif recalling her marine character), who is in turn loved by the cyclops Polyphemus (Bernard Deletré, a very resonant bass who had a lot of fun raging away as the odious giant). These three lead singers all performed admirably, although I had trouble hearing them in certain passages, probably due to their placement behind the orchestra and far away from the audience. These problems were slightly worse for the supporting singers, all of whom sang quite well nevertheless. (This is hardly Opera Lafayette's fault, since the Elsie and Marvin Dekelboum Concert Hall does not have an orchestra pit.) Ryan Brown's conducting involved his whole body in dancelike motions that did not distract, with well-chosen tempi creating striking unanimity in his players. Instrumentalists and singers all introduced very pretty ornamentation in their lines as appropriate to this music.

As with many of Lully's operas, the libretto of Acis et Galatée, by Jean Galbert de Campistron and not Lully's longtime collaborator Quinault, is somewhat pedestrian. Lully mostly avoids the Italian operatic tendency to feature singers with flashy arias, and this opera is no exception. The characters have sections of their texts set in Lully's signature arioso with a few aria-like pieces here and there. An exception is in the third act, after Polyphemus crushes his rival, Acis, with a huge rock. Galatea rises up from the sea, where she was hiding, and sings a long sort of scena, which showed off Ms. Le Roi's voice in a range of tempos and styles. You have to be careful of the Greco-Roman gods: in response to Galatea's plea that Acis be brought back to life from his unjust murder, the gods revive him, only to transform him into a river. This was one of the nicer effects provided by the dancers, who could have appeared more than they did (Lully's music seemed somewhat lifeless without more visual spectacle): they appeared as a stream of river divinities, in blue and aqua costumes, around a dancer as the metamorphosed Acis, for the final divertissement.

Lully was famous for his composition of extended passacailles, pieces based on the ostinato repetition of repeating bass line, usually on a four-bar, stepwise descending bass line, the minor mode tetrachord from do to sol. (The effect of this sort of piece, or of the related genre of the chaconne, as I said in a review of a concert I heard in Manchester last summer, is "a hypnotic suspension of the normal rules of harmony, allowing Baroque composers to introduce daring progressions.") The passacaille that concludes this opera is a doozie, lasting for most of the final scene, and involving two bass patterns in alternation, one descending and one ascending. The dancers provided beautiful motions during the orchestral interludes between the singing of soloists and chorus, all adding to the seemingly endless sequence of variation that Lully spins out minute after minute. Typical of the artificiality that led Lully to begin all of his operas with a sycophantic prologue, addressed to Louis XIV (or in this case to his son, the Grand Dauphin, who was honored at the Anet celebrations where this opera was premiered), the opera concludes by drawing attention to the presence of the audience in its story, with its final lines: "Sous ses lois l'Amour veut qu'on jouisse / D'un bonheur qui jamais ne finisse: / Tendres cœurs, venez tous / en jouir avec nous" (Under its laws Love wants us to enjoy an unending happiness: tender hearts, come all to enjoy it with us).

A note to Washington National Opera: it might be time to starting thinking about staging a Baroque opera. I have written here about how both the Opéra de Lyon (Poppea) and Opéra de Paris (Hercules) have teamed up with Les Arts Florissants to stage Baroque operas, and Concerto Vocale has been on the stage in Paris, and countertenors have even been at the Met (Rodelinda). WNO could do worse than partnering with Opera Lafayette to do a full staging of a Baroque opera at Lisner for their 2007 season. Opera did not begin with Mozart, people.

For its final performance of the season, Opera Lafayette will present Antonio Sacchini's Oedipe à Colone (1786), again at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, on Saturday, May 14, at 8 pm.

Aria on DVD

Available from Amazon: Aria (1987, remastered on DVD in 2002)

Some more yummies on DVD have come my way thanks to Netflix. You may remember seeing the team-directed movie Aria when it was originally released in 1987, which was remastered for a DVD release in 2002. I had not seen it since the original release and was glad to become reacquainted with it. The concept is simple: you take ten directors, each of whom shoots a short film using a recorded opera excerpt as the soundtrack and basis of inspiration, and you weave the whole thing together in a frame with John Hurt (The Actor), apparently remembering all of the episodes as he wanders through an opera theater (the Teatro Amilcare Ponchielli in Cremona, Italy), preparing for his role as Pagliacci. (The ten excerpts are themselves framed with music, uncredited, from Verdi's La Traviata.)

What is unusual, perhaps by design, is the emphasis on the singing of Leontyne Price, which gives some stability, at least to my ears, to a bewildering range of cinematic styles in this anthology. First, Nicolas Roeg's segment (Verdi, Un ballo in maschera, with Leontyne Price, Carlo Bergonzi, Robert Merrill, Shirley Verrett) deals with a cooky assassination story, in which comical bad guys threaten the life of King Zog of Albania (a trouser role played by Theresa Russell, the director's wife). The historical tone is immediately contradicted by Charles Sturridge's otherworldly black-and-white segment (Verdi, "La virgine degli angeli" from La Forza del Destino, sung by Leontyne Price), in which three otherwise angelic children take a joyride in a Mercedes.

Available from Amazon: Jean-Baptiste Lully, Armide, directed by Philippe Herreweghe (1993)

I think my favorite is Jean-Luc Godard's segment (Lully, Armide, in Philippe Herreweghe's older recording of this opera, with Rachel Yakar and Zeger Vandersteene, now replaced by a much better 1993 recording), which incarnates female desire and reinforces the basic truth that opera is all about sex. The twin Armides (the ravishing Marion Peterson and Valérie Allain as Les Jeunes Filles) are presented as two sides of the female personality: at one point their faces are shot side by side in closeup as one shouts "Non!" and the other "Oui!" The segment was shot on location in the Weyder Gym in Paris, with a handful of male bodybuilders, who seem to ignore the women even when they are dancing around naked. The women sometimes mouth the words of the opera, and they speak the lines in conjunction with the words sung (Godard manipulates the recorded sound with the heaviest hand). In the opera, Armide, at the moment she is about to kill her enemy, Renaud, falls in love with him (the line Il semble être fait pour l'amour, or "He seems to have been made for love," is singled out by Godard).

The funniest segment is by Julien Temple (Verdi, Rigoletto, with Robert Merrill, Anna Moffo, and Alfredo Kraus), in which an older producer and his young wife both have bizarre trysts at the same cheesy hotel (shot on location in the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, California). This is worth watching for Buck Henry's hilarious act as Preston, super high on ecstasy, and because "La donna è mobile" is sung by an Elvis impersonator (John Hostetter). Bruce Beresford's segment (Erich Korngold, Die tote Stadt, with Carol Neblett and René Kollo) features Elizabeth Hurley and Peter Birch, both often naked, lipsyncing the German words of the opera's final scene. Robert Altman's segment (Rameau, Les Boréades, the Monteverdi Choir/English Baroque Soloists recording conducted by John Eliot Gardiner) spoofs the craziness of opera audiences. It opens on a room of costumed guests watching a performance of the opera (they wear wigs, makeup, and are quite unruly, one even singing out with a performer). It was shot on location in the Théâtre Le Ranelagh in Paris (where, last year, Yoko Ono performed her one-woman Cut Show).

Franc Roddam's segment (Wagner, the "Liebestod" from Tristan und Isolde, sung by Leontyne Price) features two lovers (Bridget Fonda and James Mathers) driving through the desert. As they arrive in Las Vegas, Isolde's singing accompanies the glowing lights of the strip. They make love in a hotel room lit up by flashing neon signs and then, having gotten drunk, slit their wrists together in the bathtub. The theme of opera and death is continued in Ken Russell's segment (Puccini, "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, sung by Jussi Björling), with its quasi-Egyptian costumes and sets (as if for Magic Flute). A girl is branded on the face with a jewel brand by a man's kiss and then given an IV. As the Egyptian dream world fades away, we see that she has been in an accident (we see her clothing cut away by nurses, and the lover becomes a doctor). Given the disturbing nature of this opera's "love story," it makes sense that when the woman is on the operating table, anesthetized, she becomes the segmented body parts of a mannequin.

In the first part of Derek Jarman's segment (Gustave Charpentier, "Depuis le jour" from Louise, sung by Leontyne Price), John Hurt walks onto the stage of the empty house and looks up to see a woman seated in the center box. An old woman remembers herself as a young woman (the magnificent Tilda Swinton, who I am sure will be a perfect White Witch in Andrew Adamson's new movie The Chronicles of Narnia, planned for next December), with her lover. That memory leads into Bill Bryden's segment (Ruggiero Leoncavallo, I pagliacci, in the crackly LP version of Enrico Caruso with a terrible orchestral sound). The Actor lipsyncs the dramatic final aria ("Vesti la giubba") on the stage and falls dead.