Les Cris de Paris

Few twentieth-century creators have been as inventive as Berio in their relationship with popular and ancestral traditions – drawing material as he did from the hits by The Beatles and the soundscapes of urban streets and markets. Here Geoffroy Jourdain paints the portrait of an explorer with a passion for the human voice. Truculent and volcanic in Sequenza III (performed with panache by French mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot), lyrical and caressing in E si fussi pisci, solemn and spellbinding in Cries of London.

Few twentieth-century creators have been as inventive as Berio in their relationship with popular and ancestral traditions – drawing material as he did from the hits by The Beatles and the soundscapes of urban streets and markets. Here Geoffroy Jourdain paints the portrait of an explorer with a passion for the human voice. Truculent and volcanic in Sequenza III (performed with panache by French mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot), lyrical and caressing in E si fussi pisci, solemn and spellbinding in Cries of London.

There used to be a conventional wisdom that the music of Schumann's last years is not up to much, presumably on account of his mental illness. Perhaps the centrepiece of this prejudice is the fact that his 1853 Violin Concerto was rejected by Joachim, to whom it was dedicated, and was not included in the "complete" Schumann edition compiled by Brahms. It was not released to the public until 1934.

The transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque eras did not mark one sudden change of forms or styles, nor did it signal the end of what Claudio Monteverdi called the prima pratica, or the primary practice of Renaissance polyphony. However, a new emphasis on powerful emotional expressions became a central feature of what he dubbed the seconda pratica, which came to the fore with the development of opera, most notably in Monteverdi's L'Orfeo in 1607. Composers paid special attention to the innovations in the music of Venice, which eventually spread throughout Europe in the 17th and early 18th centuries, and such figures as Monteverdi, Antonio Lotti, and Antonio Caldara, long associated with the city, became exemplars of the new Venetian style, in both secular and sacred music.

When Henry Madin’s Te Deum for the victories of Louis XV was performed in the Chapelle Royale at Versailles in 2015, it was the first time it had been performed since its premiere in the eighteenth century. Reviving this work for the modern day is Stradivaria, the Baroque ensemble of Nantes, and Les Cris de Paris, the latter two conducted by Daniel Cuiller and Geoffroy Jourdain, respectively. Along with Te Deum, this album also features Madin’s Diligam te, Domine, a grand motet for large chorus.

Melancholic poetry provided endless nourishment for musical creativity in the late Renaissance. In his first recording for harmonia mundi, Geoffroy Jourdain leads Les Cris de Paris in music from the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Bryd to Gesualdo, Italian and English madrigals rub shoulders with motets and Tenebrae responsories, finding pleasure even in meditating on what causes one's pain.

Few twentieth-century creators have been as inventive as Berio in their relationship with popular and ancestral traditions – drawing material as he did from the hits by The Beatles and the soundscapes of urban streets and markets. Here Geoffroy Jourdain paints the portrait of an explorer with a passion for the human voice. Truculent and volcanic in Sequenza III (performed with panache by French mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot), lyrical and caressing in E si fussi pisci, solemn and spellbinding in Cries of London.