René Jacobs Gluck Orfeo & Euridice

The contents of this album reflect the operatic music Mozart would have known as a teenager. One of the composers, Christoph Willibald Gluck, is known as a founder of the Classical style in opera; others, including Johann Adolf Hasse, Johann Christian Bach, and Tommaso Traetta, are known mostly to specialists, at least in the operatic field. Listeners who have heard the spectacular arias of the late Baroque popularized by Renée Fleming and others will find the pieces here less virtuosic but more dramatically satisfying, as if the composers and librettists had engaged themselves anew with the ancient Greek stories they were retelling. One might object that annotator Denis Morrier gives short shift to the most important of the librettists, Pietro Metastasio, whose writings remained popular up to Beethoven's time.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.