L'europe Barbare

Bononcini was a contemporary of Handel and for the few years he stayed in London the two men were - presumably - friendly rivals, as both had operas staged in turn (together with a few other composers) at the newly formed Royal Academy of Music. Bononcini was an exponent of the Arcadian style of Italian opera, Handel the high dramatic. It is very much that pastoral, Arcadian approach that is on display in the music on this CD.

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann ( Concerto Polonois ) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.

Un essai interrogeant la dialectique contemporaine relative à l'ensauvagement de la société française. Convoquant les figures de Yacine Kateb ou d'Aimé Césaire, l'auteure dresse un état des lieux critique de la perception des communautés noires et arabes issues de la décolonisation dans la France du XXIe siècle. …