Jomelli

Cet enregistrement, comme les mémorables Fées du Rhin d'Offenbach, chef-d'oeuvre de l'édition 2002 où Friedemann Layer était déjà au pupitre, fait partie de la série consacrée aux oeuvres "redécouvertes", si l'on peut dire, par René Koering à travers le Festival de Radio France-Montpellier dont on saluera au passage la programmation courageuse et originale.

Niccolò Jommelli was one of the most sought after composers of his time, but finally accepted to become musical director at the court of Stuttgart in 1753. Three years later he composed his Requiem to commemorates the recent death of the Duchess von Württemberg, mother of his patron, the Duke Carl Eugen.. Despite the fact that Jommelli owed his fame almost exclusively to his operas during his lifetime, the Requiem became his most famous work after his death; the almost one hundred handwritten and printed copies of the entire work or fragments of it that have survived in some seventy libraries throughout Europe, some also in the USA, bear witness to this. Whilst the score and parts of the first performance have been lost, we can still form a reasonably good idea of the original instrumentation thanks to a surviving list of payments made to the musicians. We know that there were eight singers (one female and seven male) in addition to Jommelli.

Jomelli, regarded by many of his contemporaries as the greatest opera composer of the century, sets the lamentations in a dramatic and religio-operatic style as a duet between two high voices. Gérard Lesne receives higher billing than Véronique Gens on the cover of the CD, but they both sing exquisitely well – too well, perhaps, for the music to be regarded in the light of a meditation on the Passion, but that’s the way that Jommelli writes it.

Responsories for the Triduum sacrum, the last three days of the Holy Week before Easter Sunday, are classic examples of Haydn’s manner of composing, as influenced by the “stile antico”. With these homophonic pieces, which are directed inwards and which concentrate on the expressive presentation of the text, Haydn stands in a long tradition of these multi-voice settings: this tradition ranges from Victoria and Ingegneri at the end of the 16th century via Zelenka and Jomelli in the middle of the 18th through the composers of the Viennese classical school.

Charles-François Clément, born in Provence around 1720 and died in Paris in 1789, was professor of harpsichord in Paris, where he published: three cantatilles entitled Le Départ des guerriers, le Retour des guerriers in 1750 and Le Célibat in 1762; a book of Sonates en Trio pour un Clavecin et un Violon5 in 1743; a Harpsichord Journal, containing ariettes and arias transcribed for Harpsichord alone or with violin accompaniments; The music was chosen from the interludes and the successful comic operas. This journal was published monthly in Paris during the years 1762, 1763, 1764 and 1765, in-4 ° obl.