Sylvain Bergeron Livre de Luth de Gioseppe Antonio Doni

This album compares hits from the Renaissance (by Rore, Lasso, Arcadelt and others) with their instrumental ornamented arrangement published in 1591 by Venetian Giovanni Bassano, author of a reference treatise on arrangement. It also includes some Paladino transcriptions for solo lute, performed by Anthony Bailes.

Both of us have grown up with this music from the cradle of our earliest infancy; […] It is music that allowed us to become what we are, while at the same time encouraging us to question things constantly. […] Now, playing the music – because, as we all know, we play rather than make music – has become a part that each of us plays, played here as a double act. Each one for himself, with his instrument as a crucible, and at the same time each of us for the other, since after all we are engaged in a performance.

Today Antonio Caldara is not a name many would recognise let alone regard as one of the 'great' composers of the Baroque, yet during his own lifetime and long after his death he was held in high esteem by composers and theoreticians alike. Johann Sebastian Bach, for example is known to have made a copy of a Magnificat by Caldara to which he added a two-violin accompaniment to the "Suscepit Israel" section. According to Mattheson, Georg Philipp Telemann in his early years took Caldara as a model for his church and instrumental music. Franz Joseph Haydn, who was taken to Vienna by Georg Reutter, one of Caldara's pupils, sang many of his sacred works when he was a choirboy at St. Stephens and possessed copies of two of Caldara's Masses.

Alexandre Tharaud pays tribute to composers associated with the courts of the French kings Louis XIV, XV and XVI. Lully, Rameau, Charpentier and François Couperin stand beside lesser-known masters: d’Anglebert, Forqueray, Royer, Duphly and Balbastre. “I’ve always been attracted by French music of this period,” says Tharaud, adding that when he plays the album’s initial Rameau prelude, “It’s like being alone at Versailles, opening the doors and entering those huge, imposing rooms.”

‘Not only do I like, admire, and adore your music, I have fallen in love with it, and am still smitten,’ wrote the young Marcel Proust to Gabriel Fauré in 1897. And added, ‘I know your work well enough to write a 300-page volume about it.’ Clearly, In Search of Lost Time is not a book devoted to Fauré, but this composer occupies a more important place therein than has been noted. Along with Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré was the mentor and guiding light of the author’s early years when the young man drew on his conversations with the master and on a re-hearing of Fauré’s scores to expand his musical knowledge and creative thought: ‘I spoke at great length with Fauré last night,’ a 24-year-old Proust confided to Hahn as early as 1895.