Les Miserablez

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.

The notion of interpretation constantly raises the question of how to read a score, and therefore of the very subject matter of the score. Particularly in the Baroque period, and especially in the seventeenth-century, the score is but an infrastructure that the composer leaves behind to allow his work to be brought to life. One should not be led astray by it as you might by a trompel'œil; it lacks a great deal of information: nuances, instrumentation, ornaments, playing styles, etc. The majority of these composers thus leave the performers a great deal of latitude for the completion of their scores in order to bring them to back to life.

This programme marks the eagerly awaited return of Véronique Gens to Baroque music and Lully, in which she made a name for herself at the start of her career. It presents airs from Atys, Persée, Alceste, Proserpine, Le Triomphe de l’Amour and other works by Louis XIV’s famous composer, but also several by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Médée), Henry Desmarets and Pascal Collasse. Whether well known, rare or in some cases even unpublished, all of them present roles for powerful women whose love is unrequited: dark passions, bitter laments, jealousy, vengeance, the type of dramatic characters that Véronique Gens embodies with all the charisma that has made her reputation. This recording is also the result of an encounter with the youthful ensemble Les Surprises, founded and directed by Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas. Together they conceived this programme, which mingles airs, dances and choruses, in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.

The violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber (1644–1704) was a celebrated Kapellmeister at the court of Archbishop Max Gandolph of Salzburg. Present-day audiences tend to think of him first and foremost as the author of anthologies of spectacular violin music such as his Rosary Sonatas of around 1670 and his Sonatas for solo violin of 1681. But attitudes to these works were initially devastatingly dismissive. In 1927, the eighth – posthumous – edition of Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski’s seminal Die Violine und ihre Meister appeared with revisions by the author’s son, Waldemar, and assured its readers that only “some” of these pieces were of “lasting musical merit”.

Behind Brahms the titan, ambitious heir to Beethoven and Schumann, stands one of the greatest composers for the choir, an accomplice observer of Viennese customs. Love songs with a dance rhythm, the Liebeslieder Walzer express in turn desire, nostalgia, sorrow and amusement in the dialogue of hearts. To this emblematic collection, Léo Warynski joins several jewels of Brahmsian vocal art, where the colors of his Metaboles shine, accompanied here by pianists Yoan Héreau and Edoardo Torbianelli who complete the program with a selection of waltzes and Hungarian dances.

This programme marks the eagerly awaited return of Véronique Gens to Baroque music and Lully, in which she made a name for herself at the start of her career. It presents airs from Atys, Persée, Alceste, Proserpine, Le Triomphe de l’Amour and other works by Louis XIV’s famous composer, but also several by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Médée), Henry Desmarets and Pascal Collasse. Whether well known, rare or in some cases even unpublished, all of them present roles for powerful women whose love is unrequited: dark passions, bitter laments, jealousy, vengeance, the type of dramatic characters that Véronique Gens embodies with all the charisma that has made her reputation. This recording is also the result of an encounter with the youthful ensemble Les Surprises, founded and directed by Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas. Together they conceived this programme, which mingles airs, dances and choruses, in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.