Jean Baptiste Lully

The first volume of Tempesta di Mare's series on Chandos, Comédie et Tragédie, offers period-style performances of orchestral music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Féry Rebel, and Marin Marais. The orchestral suites drawn from Lully's music for Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Rebel's symphonie nouvelle Les élémens, and Marais' suite from the tragédie en musique Alcyone give a taste of theater music in the court of Louis XIV and Louis XV, and these pieces show how inventive composers were with instrumentation and their combinations of dances with dramatic scene painting. Tempesta di Mare, which is also known as the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra, gives bright and energetic performances, and the musicians have a fine sense of the swung rhythms, distinctive tone colors, and lively ornamentation in French Baroque music. The recording is clear and well-balanced, though the percussion in Lully's March for the Turkish Ceremony (track 4) is a bit startling, and the dissonant opening of Rebel's Le Chaos (track 13) has its own shock value. Highly recommended.

Voici la bande originale du film de Gérard Corbiau, réalisateur notamment du film Farinelli. On ne peut qu'admirer le soin avec lequel le cinéaste a mis en lumière les conflits et l'admiration réciproque entre les deux astres de Versailles : Louis XIV et Jean-Baptiste Lully. La musique est pétillante d'intelligence, de couleurs, de rebondissements, comme les intrigues de la première cour du monde. Sous la baguette explosive de Reinhard Göbel, le Musica Antiqua Köln révèle les contrastes les plus violents. C'est un bain de jouvence qui nous fait entrer dans un univers de théâtre aussi fascinant… Que dangereux !

Grands motets, requiring lavish vocal and instrumental resources, always signalled important occasions at the French court. Until the advent of public concerts in Paris in the 1720s they were performed exclusively by the king's musicians for the court. Olivier Schneebeli has assembled an admirable survey of these large-scale settings of psalm texts, which were excerpted and arranged to convey doubles entendres flattering to Louis XIV and his policies. The music employs an orchestra with a full continuo complement, a choir and a petit choeur of soloists that relies on high male voices. The only concession to modern times is the use of sopranos instead of castrati in the top part and the inclusion of girls among the pages.

Nowadays, little introduction on record is needed for the dramatic output of Jean-Baptiste Lully: his style has become unquestionably associated with French music of the 17th century. But long before he became the all-conquering composer of tragédies en musique at the court of Louis XIV, Giovanni Battista Lulli, during his early years in Paris and encouraged by the also Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, helped to spread the music from his native country into the French court. Lully’s own initial compositions - forging his unmistakable style - focused on music for ballets de cour and for these his instrumental entrées were combined with vocal sections in Italian such as arias and Le Florentin’s early treatment of recitative. Not just transalpine composers were welcomed in Paris but singers too.

Armide was Lully and Quinault's last tragedie lyrique: undoubtedly Quinault's finest dramatic achievement, and the culmination of the tragedie en musique conceived by Lully, who died the year after its creation. Never has language appeared so beautiful and tragic in Lully's music, and the drama of this Christian knight falling in love with the sorceress who refuses to kill him was so deeply felt that it remained on stage for a century! Here, Vincent Dumestre passionately conducts Lully's last masterpiece, whose eponymous character, played by the immense Stephanie d'Oustrac, never ceases to bewitch us.

Cinq ans après Atys, Armide grâce à la sensibilité de Philippe Herreweghe est l’objet d’un accomplissement rare. Depuis Cadmus (1673), Lully travaille la déclamation chantée dont le meilleur exemple ici est dans les nombreuses langueurs qui étreignent le cour d’Armide, le célèbre « Enfin il est en ma puissance » (II,4), modèle de l’art lullyste, cité par Rameau pendant la Querelle des Bouffons (1753). Voici la seconde approche de l’ouvrage par le chef flamand. La lisibilité de la progression dramatique est assurée par la définition d’un orchestre, précis, fascinant, véritable acteur. Outre Acis (passacaille finale), ouvrage ultime, aucune ouvre à part Armide, n’exprime à ce degré, l’émotivité instrumentale de Lully.

An ancient hero, a dragon, a young goddess: love and glory are at the heart of Lullys first opera, first performed in front of Louis XIV. As in his previous works - divertissements, ballets de cour and comédies- ballets - Lully makes the voices and the orchestra sparkle, multiplying the pieces which stand out and that were appealing to the court. But with the help of the librettist Philippe Quinault, he introduced the dramatic force of French classical tragédie in an exclusively musical work: and here the audience was bewitched by the mythical love stories so sumptuously portrayed.

Christophe Rousset and Talens Lyriques return to Lully and his seventh opera, Isis. Inspired both by Roman mythology and Ancient Egypt, Isis is a story of love and jealousy. This plot caused a scandal at the Royal Court when Madame de Montespan, who was the King's favorite, saw in it a reference to her own situation, the Sun King being at that time occupied with a new mistress. The work's dramatic intensity provides Lully with many occasions to show his remarkable talent for orchestration. Featuring the Chamber Choir of Namur and a brilliant cast of soloists, this recording revives a neglected gem of the French Baroque repertoire.

The musical world owes a debt of gratitude to French conductor Christophe Rousset not only for the vital, exquisite performances he delivers with the ensembles Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de Chambre de Namur, but for his work in bringing to light neglected masterpieces of Baroque opera. Lully's Bellérophon, premiered in 1679, was a huge success in its time, with an initial run of nine months. Part of its popularity was doubtless due to the parallels that could be drawn between its plot and certain recent exploits of Louis XV, but even the earliest critics recognized the score's uniqueness and exceptional quality within Lully's oeuvre, so it's perhaps surprising that it has never been recorded before.

'Armide' is in the form of a tragédie en musique, a genre invented by Lully and Quinault, and was their last collaboration. It was a new form of opera that combined elements of classical French drama with ballet, French song and a new form of recitative. Critics in the 18th century regarded 'Armide' as Lully's masterpiece and it continues to be well-regarded, featuring some of the best-known music in French baroque opera and being arguably ahead of its time in its psychological interest. The subject, chosen for Lully by King Louis XIV, is the enchantress Armide’s unhappy love for the knight Renaud, drawn from Tasso’s 'Gerusalemme liberata'.