Les Paladins

Jerome Correas and Les Paladins invite you to listen to this new disc on b.records where you travel to the court of Mantua when Vivaldi was composing the Concerto da Camera. The works that make up the Tempesta di Mare are extremely virtuoso and expressive and were written at the time in the composers career when he explored timbres and rhythms resulting in an explosion of colour. To consumer without moderation!

Karine Deshayes, one of today's most remarkable interpreters of Mozart together with the vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Paladins, gives an outstanding performance in this program of his sacred and secular works, in which the motet Exsultate, jubilate! Forms the centrepiece. Her rich, full-bodied voice taps directly into the roots of this highly virtuosic piece, originally written for a powerful, resonant soprano castrato tessitura. Conducted by Jérôme Corréas, the musicians complete the program with a selection of early pieces by Mozart: several of his (unjustly underrated) Church Sonatas, his Symphony No. 17, a poetic Agnus Dei from the Vespers, and excerpts from the all too rarely heard Davide penintente and La Betulia liberata. Through his attention to contrast and his concern for expressivity, the conductor reveals the underlying theatricality of these works, unparalleled in their dramatic power.

A most famous composer in London at the time of Haendel and a great protagonist of the Ospedali musicali in Venice, Nicola Antonio Porpora (1686-1768) is nevertheless forgotten gloomily of our musical culture. To the rare discographic recordings dedicated to his music, we can add this one, conducted magnificently by Jérôme Correas. (…) Correas interpretation is sensitive, vivid and it stands like a mirror of Porpora's vocal vuirtuosity ; this exaggerated virtuosity is here a natural and vital component of the score, fostering an atmosphere of fervent mysticism (…) that arouse emotions.

After triumphant recordings of Handelian opera seria and other Italian material, soprano Sandrine Piau, France's voice of the Baroque, turns her attention to repertory that is very little known outside of France. Even in their homeland, Piau writes in the CD booklet, these arias and instrumental music are merely "not exactly virgin territory."

Inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, Rameau produced perhaps his most brilliant music for his penultimate great work, blending reality and the surreal on several levels. This passionate new production by José Montalvo stunningly choreographed by Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu, sets new standards in entertainment, charm and ingenuity. The sharp and spectacular multimedia staging does full justice to Rameau's dazzling burlesque, confirming Olivier Rouvière's statement that ‘Les Paladins' is the last laugh of a witty 77-year old composer’. Recorded live in 2004 at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet in true surround sound, both the virtuoso cast and Les Arts Florissants are in top form, clearly enjoying themselves in the masterful hands of William Christie.

The music on this disc comes from Rome in the middle seventeenth century, and it is seemingly, to use a word that recurs several times in the dense but informative booklet, paradoxical. Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665) was a composer who worked at the feet of popes. Yet the music here is stylistically of the sensuous seconda prattica, the operatic art of Monteverdi and his cohorts in the generation before. If the term "Counter Reformation" brings to mind music like Palestrina's, know that you get something very different here, something closer to the religious masterworks of Monteverdi's later career but on a more intimate scale.

Jean-Claude Malgoire has been one of the more important French conductors of the latter twentieth and early twenty first centuries. He has focused heavily on Baroque music, though his repertory also includes operas by Mozart and Salieri. As music director of the La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy and l'Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing, he has given many highly acclaimed concerts and opera productions, and made numerous recordings with major labels.