Isabelle, L'après Midi

Between 1710 and 1726 Clerambault published five anthologies of cantatas amounting to 20 works in all; additionally, there are some half-dozen separate cantatas of which La muse de l'Opera (1716) is one. Orphee comes from Book I (1710), not 1728 as stated on the jewel-case, Pirame et Tisbe from Book II (1713), and La mort d'Hercule from Book III (1716). These cantatas together give us a vivid picture of Clerambault's fertile imagination and his ability to draw on a wide range of affects.

The Mozart sonatas for fortepiano and violin, as they are accurately called, represented a genre that was beginning to become old-fashioned in Mozart's own time, with the piano the dominant instrument and the violin, during Mozart's youth at least, an almost optional accompaniment. They aren't played as often as Mozart's other chamber music, but there are many ways to play them. It is good to have a spate of new recordings oriented toward historical performance; these put the listener closer to Mozart's experimental frame of mind in this genre.

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin go back a long way together. This recording, made with the welcome participation of Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit, follows the complete violin concertos (2019), which left a lasting impression. Ever since a memorable first recording in the late 1990s, the Berlin musicians have returned regularly to the inexhaustible source of the Brandenburgs. They have achieved a sovereign mastery of what is not a single work, but six. In their hands, they become successive episodes of a piece of musical theater in love with dance, transparent sound and freedom.

Scarlatti's cantatas are veritable opera miniatures in wich his writing for the voice, highlights the expressive powers of the various affects of love : love the pleasure-seeker, love the tyrant, love the traitor and love the combatant. Voice and instruments are unite in an inventive spirit of virtuoso rivalry, laying bare the passions of the soul.