Purcell, Dido And Aenes, Les Arts Florissants

A live performance from October 2011 at the Theatre de Caen affords a superb introduction to Cavalli’s rarely performed 1641 opera La Didone. William Christie leads Les Arts Florissants in beautifully realized period style, while French stage actor Clement Hervieu-Leger, in his operatic directorial debut, draws powerful and moving characterizations from a large, versatile cast.

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.

This box set assembles the complete Monteverdi recordings that William Christie and Les Arts Florissants made for harmonia mundi over some fifteen years. Together, they constantly refreshed their inspiration at the wellspring of his finest and most famous madrigals, with a memorable incursion into the sacred repertory of the Selva morale.