Les Miserablez

The circumstances of the composition of Purcell’s only opera, Dido and Æneas, are unclear. First performed in the 1680s, it received few performances in the composer’s lifetime, before disappearing until its revival at the very end of the nineteenth century. This miniature, poetic, dramatic, delightfully melodic, and containing some unforgettably beautiful vocal pieces (Dido’s “Lament”, the Witches’ songs…) has enjoyed great success ever since.

ATMA Classique is delighted to present Anguille sous roche (Something fishy!), the first recording by the latest incarnation of renowned viol duo Les Voix humaines. The new pairing consists of Mélisande Corriveau, who succeeds the duo’s co-founder Margaret Little, and Susie Napper. Corriveau and Napper have performed together for two decades as members of Les Voix humaines Consort. Both play on historic viols by London luthier, Barak Norman.

Forty-two songs cut between November 1940 and August 1946, and the perfect companion to Bear Family's It's Magic box set – anyone who's been even tempted to own that will have to get this more modestly priced precursor to that material. Day's period singing with Les Brown is, today, regarded with a degree of love and affection reserved for Ella Fitzgerald's era with Chick Webb, or Frank Sinatra's work with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Yet Sony Music's own releases devoted to Doris Day and Les Brown spread the music around to several different CDs, and suffered from sound that, today, seems substandard. These newly remastered tracks, offered in chronological order, including one previously unissued song ("Are You Still in Love with Me"), not only display a far richer, warmer sound, but have been presented with the kind of care that is normally reserved for the best parts of a label's catalog – which these sides definitely are. Day's voice during this period (she was 16 when she cut her first sides with Brown) was an astonishingly expressive instrument.

André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry’s three-act opera Guillaume Tell was first performed in 1791 at the Salle Favart of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris. The opera deals with the Swiss fight for freedom in the 14th century against the domination of the Habsburgs. The story of Wilhelm Tell is well-known.

Les Kapsber’girls, an ensemble of four singers and instrumentalists directed by the lutenist Albane Imbs, has already released its debut album (Che fai tù?, released on Muso) which received several awards. The group now joins Alpha for several recordings, starting with Vous avez dit Brunettes? – ‘brunettes’ being the name of the chansons that lovers crooned in each others’ ears by the Bassin d’Apollon or among the groves of the Petit Trianon at Versailles Palace, undeniably light in character yet powerfully authentic. Seventeenth-century France was home to a host of artists whose talent served the nobility and the bourgeoisie, who were extremely partial to these airs. Performing them as vocal solos or duets with lute or viol, Les Kapsber’girls bring back to life, more than three centuries later, these works published by Ballard & Fils, printers to the Sun King, alongside such little-known composers as Julie Pinel and Giuseppe Saggione.

With their bold harmonies, their counterpoint of unequalled refinement and their raw emotion, the Tenebrae Responsories are the sacred counterpart to Gesualdo’s last two books of madrigals, published the same year (1611). Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants here prolong their critically acclaimed exploration of those six increasingly venomous collections. Their interpretation of the Responsories for Maundry Thursday subtly shifts towards the conscious dolorism of the late works of the Prince of Venosa.

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.