Purcell, Dido And Aenes, Les Arts Florissants

On the strength of the immense success of Dido & Aeneas and King Arthur, in 1692 Purcell went on to produce The Fairy Queen, based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. The work is, in fact, a ‘semi-opera’, or ‘opera with dialogue’, in which only some of the crucial scenes are provided with music. But this version of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream by the ‘Orpheus Britannicus’ became almost as famous as the play that inspired it, with its love scenes, its supernatural scenes and its innate sense of musical humour investing it with an irresistible savour and enchantment.This title was released for the first time in 1989.

This is a disc of Christmas music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), all the works written during the 1690s possibly for performance at the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis where the composer was Master of the Music. The wide variety of mood, colour and style underlines the extraordinary versatility and originality of this composer, upon whom Carissimi was the strongest influence during his student days in Rome in the 1660s. He was highly prolific (there are no less than 35 works in the oratorio style) and wrote a great deal of both moving and dramatic music.

This Virgin Classics release reunites William Christie and Les Arts Florissants with the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a composer for whom it can be said Christie has done more to expose than any other he has taken on. This is saying a lot, as Christie has also made extensive recorded forays into the works of Campra, Lully, Montéclair, Monteverdi, Purcell, and in particular, Handel. However, Charpentier remains a special case to Christie, and there is still a monumental amount of unrecorded music by this composer to exploit. The two works on Virgin Classics' Charpentier: Judicium Salomonis actually have been recorded before, though not often and not by well-known groups like Christie's – the Motet pour une longue Offrande has been recorded by Philippe Herreweghe and that's about it in terms of the competition.

Charpentier’s Médée is one of the glories of the Baroque. Medea’s betrayal by Jason, her comprehensive revenge and the plight of those caught up in this epic tragedy prompted Charpentier to compose music of devastating power. Transcending the constraints of the Lullian tragédie lyrique, he produced characterisations of astonishing complexity and invested vast stretches of music with a dramatic pace and a harmonic richness rivalled among contemporaries only by Purcell. The electrifying exchanges of the third act, mingling pathos with extreme violence, alone put Charpentier on the same imaginative level as Rameau and Berlioz. The machinations of the fourth act and the dénouement in the fifth maintain the same captivating impetus.

In 1641 Monteverdi made this masterpiece based on Homer’s Odyssey for a public opera house in Venice. It has more characters than you can shake a stick at – presumably one reason why William Christie chose to direct it from the harpsichord – so it needs a cast that has strength in depth. Luckily, these performers from the 2009 production at the Teatro Real in Madrid are superb. Christine Rice gives us a finely-paced Penelope, full of complexity beyond the merely stoical, and with a dark voice that signals restrained fury as well as painful neglect.

Pygmalion is, perhaps, Rameau's most consistently alluring ac/c de ballet whose overture, at least, was greatly admired in the composer's lifetime. There have been three earlier commercial recordings of which only the most recent, on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, is currently available. Pygmalion was Rameau's second ac/c de ballet and it contains affecting and vigorous music in the composer's richest vein. The action takes place in Pygmalion's studio. Captivated by the appearance of the statue he has just completed, Pygmalion, legendary King of Cyprus, falls in love with it.

Fully integrated with the musical line, the singers avoid melodrama through intimate, small gestures as if acting for screen, not stage.’ Gramophone Critics' Choice 2021 Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants conclude their exploration of this fascinating corpus. Even more than in his first books, Gesualdo here displays incredible modernity, playing in inimitable fashion on dissonances and chromaticisms. Love and death, joys and sorrows embrace and clash amid ever bolder harmonies.

Jean-Philippe Rameau was still a young musician when he moved to Lyon, where he probably composed his few surviving motets, including the Grand Motet In Convertendo, here performed by Les Arts Florissants under William Christie, which anticipates Rameau’s orchestration in his later operatic works. The wonderful fugue on Psalm 126 (verse 6) Euntes ibant et flebant (They went forth and wept) bears comparison with similar works by his contemporary, J. S. Bach.

Commissioned by the Comte d’Ogny for the Le Concert de la Loge Olympique, the ‘Paris’ Symphonies form a key milestone in Haydn’s output.