Olivier Penin Bach à la Francaise

For his first CD with La Dolce Volta, Olivier Latry has chosen a programme devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. This recording, made on the massive Cavaille-Coll organ of Notre-Dame de Paris, of which he is titular organist, raises a number of fascinating questions.

Évangiles, législations, mythes, contes populaires, épopées, apocalypses… La Bible est composée d'une extrême diversité de genres et de textes littéraires, dont l'incorporation au sein d'un "canon" unifié résulte d'une forte tradition interprétative, juive ou chrétienne. Plus qu'un livre, il s'agit d'une bibliothèque mondiale, dont l'influence s'exerce dans plusieurs domaines, comme la littérature, le cinéma et la culture politique. Olivier Millet explore ces relations qu'entretient la Bible avec notre monde contemporain, dans une réflexion stimulante et surprenante à bien des égards. …

For the staging of Odipe à Colone Antonio Sacchini could count on the support of Marie Antoinette Queen of France, who wanted to inaugurate, with this opera, the new theatre of Versailles on 4th January 1786. Due to inadequate machinery and some poor performances, however, success was not what had been expected. To console Sacchini of the near-failure, the Queen promised him to have Odipe repeated under better circumstances in the autumn, at Fontainebleau with the company of the Opéra, but the terrible events of the necklace affair made her too vulnerable to impose her choice. Already gravely ill, the composer took the news very badly: he died a few days later, in the night of October 8th, 1786. The première of Odipe à Colone took place on 1st February 1787 at Paris’s Opéra, in front of a full house. It was a triumph. Odipe à Colone kept reaping exceptional success up until 1844, reaching almost 600 performances and enthusing renowned composers such as Piccini and Berlioz.