Jerome Correas Les Paladins

A most famous composer in London at the time of Haendel and a great protagonist of the Ospedali musicali in Venice, Nicola Antonio Porpora (1686-1768) is nevertheless forgotten gloomily of our musical culture. To the rare discographic recordings dedicated to his music, we can add this one, conducted magnificently by Jérôme Correas. (…) Correas interpretation is sensitive, vivid and it stands like a mirror of Porpora's vocal vuirtuosity ; this exaggerated virtuosity is here a natural and vital component of the score, fostering an atmosphere of fervent mysticism (…) that arouse emotions.

Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674) celebrated his 400th birthday in 2005. Reason enough to pay tribute to this most important composer of the 17th century with a recording of some of his oratorios. Thanks to a very lively live recording of a concert with Jérome Correas and Les Paladins on Pan Classics, we now get to know five of his much admired oratorios.

Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) was a worthy successor to Monteverdi on the Venetian musical scene, and while his operas may not sustain the level of exalted musical inspiration and psychological depth of Monteverdi's, they come close enough to fully deserve the recognition they are beginning to receive. Like Monteverdi, Cavalli was a master dramatist, and his operas bristle with theatrical energy and vivid musical characterizations. L'Ormindo (1644), the first of his operas to be rediscovered (by Raymond Leppard, who conducted it at Glyndebourne in 1967), was written just two years after L'incoronazione di Poppea, and shares some of its attributes, most notably a remarkably expressive use of recitative, intriguing characters, and a dramatically arresting intermingling of comic and serious elements.

Soprano Sandrine Piau's new project is dedicated to French baroque repertoire, offering a wide range of very beautiful arias by Rameau, Lully, Campra etc in a 100-year journey that mixes very famous music with little-know pieces, such as arias by Grétry or Sacchini > Sandrine Piau and Jérôme Correas, a former singer, founder and music director of Les Paladins, have worked together on a regular basis since their early careers, especially with William Christie.

Jerome Correas and Les Paladins invite you to listen to this new disc on b.records where you travel to the court of Mantua when Vivaldi was composing the Concerto da Camera. The works that make up the Tempesta di Mare are extremely virtuoso and expressive and were written at the time in the composers career when he explored timbres and rhythms resulting in an explosion of colour. To consumer without moderation!

After triumphant recordings of Handelian opera seria and other Italian material, soprano Sandrine Piau, France's voice of the Baroque, turns her attention to repertory that is very little known outside of France. Even in their homeland, Piau writes in the CD booklet, these arias and instrumental music are merely "not exactly virgin territory."

Karine Deshayes, one of today's most remarkable interpreters of Mozart together with the vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Paladins, gives an outstanding performance in this program of his sacred and secular works, in which the motet Exsultate, jubilate! Forms the centrepiece. Her rich, full-bodied voice taps directly into the roots of this highly virtuosic piece, originally written for a powerful, resonant soprano castrato tessitura. Conducted by Jérôme Corréas, the musicians complete the program with a selection of early pieces by Mozart: several of his (unjustly underrated) Church Sonatas, his Symphony No. 17, a poetic Agnus Dei from the Vespers, and excerpts from the all too rarely heard Davide penintente and La Betulia liberata. Through his attention to contrast and his concern for expressivity, the conductor reveals the underlying theatricality of these works, unparalleled in their dramatic power.

The music on this disc comes from Rome in the middle seventeenth century, and it is seemingly, to use a word that recurs several times in the dense but informative booklet, paradoxical. Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665) was a composer who worked at the feet of popes. Yet the music here is stylistically of the sensuous seconda prattica, the operatic art of Monteverdi and his cohorts in the generation before. If the term "Counter Reformation" brings to mind music like Palestrina's, know that you get something very different here, something closer to the religious masterworks of Monteverdi's later career but on a more intimate scale.

Les Paladins has much experience with music of this kind. On the whole their performances are lively and mostly quite theatrical, but they have no problems with the more introverted pieces either… this is an enjoyable and recommedable recording which give some examples of the huge oeuvre Rossi and Marazzoli have left. There is still much to discover in this respect, and this disc can give some idea about the quality of their respective compositions.