la Veillee Imaginaire

Eleven musicians, led by Laurent Tixier - singer and instrumentalist - and Miguel Henry - arranger, lute player and conductor, have selected and performed the finest musical works from the Vendee's oral heritage, in an orchestration faithful to the spirit of Baroque music.

Les amours de Ragonde (The Loves of Ragonde, original title: Le mariage de Ragonde et de Colin ou La Veillée de Village) is an opera in three acts by Jean-Joseph Mouret with a libretto by Philippe Néricault Destouches. It was first performed at the Château de Sceaux in December, 1714. It is one of the first French comic operas.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643 – 24 February 1704) was a French composer of the Baroque era.
Exceptionally prolific and versatile, Charpentier produced compositions of the highest quality in several genres. His mastery in writing sacred vocal music, above all, was recognized and hailed by his contemporaries.

Due to legal complications engineered by Jean-Baptiste Lully and effected by Louis XIV, Marc-Antoine Charpentier's brilliant incidental music for Molière's final comedy, Le Malade imaginaire (1672-1674), was subjected to two drastic revisions. Despite the composer's usual precautions and careful maintenance of his manuscripts, the work's ordering became confused and scores of two important sections – the "Premier intermède" and the "Petit opéra impromptu" – lost. Thanks to the work of musicologists John S. Powell and H. Wiley Hitchcock, the full work has been reconstructed from surviving parts and restored for performance. The 1990 recording by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants is the most complete and authoritative version available; but if that makes it seem stuffy and dry, then hearing the performance will come as a glorious surprise.

The four Salve Regina recordings presented on this uniquely compiled new album cross the boundary between opera house and church a boundary that in 18th-century Naples was never very forbidding to begin with. In fact, Leo, Pergolesi and Porpora are all fine examples of composers who moved with unselfconscious facility between sacred and secular genres, between old counterpoint and the Monteverdian stile concertato that caressed each word with sensuous melismas and velvet harmonies. Porpora was a noted singing teacher of his day, intimately familiar with everything that a voice can do, and possessing a melodic skill that spins long and ornate vocal phrases of almost instrumental effect.

For her new album Une cantate imaginaire, Nathalie Stutzmann has imagined an “ideal” cantata based on the most beautiful music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, including vocal arias of course, but also instrumental pieces and even chorales. Arias of gallantry or tenderness, anger, love, fear or despair… every register of expression comes together in her “Cantate imaginaire”, giving birth to an entirely work with an album constructed in a single, continuous breath. An emotional Gem.