Auvity Cyril

Following on acclaimed releases of Bellerophon and Phaeton, Christophe Rousset continues his revival of Lully's tragedies lyriques for the Aparte label with Amadis. One of the composer's finest scores, Amadis is a masterpiece of French Baroque music. It was Louis XIV himself who asked Lully and his librettist Quinault to base an opera on Montalvo's Amadis de Gaula. Avoiding the usual mythological subjects gave the composer and librettist an opportunity to expand the scope of the tragedie lyrique genre.

This is an attractive programme of comparatively rare vocal repertoire. Airs de cour by Charpentier (including verses from Corneille’s Le Cid) and Lambert are interpersed with instrumental movements from Couperin’s Les Nations. Cyril Auvity is an experienced advocate of the haute-contre repertoire and draws on all that experience to engage fully with the texts of these miniature dramas. His tone in the higher register can verge on the harsh, though this is a rare event.

Amongst several contemporaries of Scarlatti who devoted themselves to the solo cantata, one of the most prolific was influential globetrotter Giovanni Bononcini, who wrote up to 283. During the first quarter of the 18th century, Bononcini's cantatas represented the principal trend of this genre. In these works, a fluent and effective technique is combined with a real gift for the composition of melodies. These lamenti are the central element of Bononcini's dramatic works; his genius is perfectly adapted to tender and pathetic emotions. Another important aspect of his music is the magnificent use of the text. In 1789, Charles Burney called Bononcini "the most prolific cantatas composer" and claimed that Bononcini's recitatives were universally perceived as the best of their time. Now, Cyril Auvity and his ensemble L'Yriade offer an enthusiastic and totally committed interpretation of some of Bononcini's cantatas, revealing the extreme force of those magical works.

The surviving musical edition of Dutch Golden Age “Renaissance Man”, Constantijn Huygens receives a fresh new recording – issued on Glossa – from a singer who has become a connoisseur of vocal music from the seventeenth century: Cyril Auvity.

This recording provides an opportunity to discover a forgotten Baroque operatic treasure, a zarzuela, the key dramatic and musical genre of the Spanish Golden Age. Sumptuous choruses, poignant arias and folksongs blend in a rich and spectacular narrative, whose music was falsely attributed to Antonio Literes before Sebastián Durón (1660-1716) was acknowledged as its composer in 2009! Another peculiarity of the work is that it is sung by seven sopranos, who are even given the roles of Apollo, Neptune and the monster Triton. Only the part of an old man, the seer Proteus, is assigned to a tenor. Ana Quintans in the title role, Isabelle Druet, Anthea Pichanick, Caroline Meng and Cyril Auvity are among the cast of this colourful zarzuela, whose modern stage premiere in 2019 enjoyed great success.

The notion of interpretation constantly raises the question of how to read a score, and therefore of the very subject matter of the score. Particularly in the Baroque period, and especially in the seventeenth-century, the score is but an infrastructure that the composer leaves behind to allow his work to be brought to life. One should not be led astray by it as you might by a trompel'œil; it lacks a great deal of information: nuances, instrumentation, ornaments, playing styles, etc. The majority of these composers thus leave the performers a great deal of latitude for the completion of their scores in order to bring them to back to life.