Les Combatants

The circumstances of the composition of Purcell’s only opera, Dido and Æneas, are unclear. First performed in the 1680s, it received few performances in the composer’s lifetime, before disappearing until its revival at the very end of the nineteenth century. This miniature, poetic, dramatic, delightfully melodic, and containing some unforgettably beautiful vocal pieces (Dido’s “Lament”, the Witches’ songs…) has enjoyed great success ever since.

Naples was in the mid-18th century the third largest European city and one of the greatest centres of political, commercial and cultural influence. The conservatoires there were founded by religious orders and were originally intended as charitable institutions for the accommodation and education of orphans, but soon became real centres of musical education and performance; many leading composers were pupils and teachers there and so contributed to the founding of the Neapolitan School. Porpora and Hasse are the greatest representatives of the Neapolitan style and both settled in Venice before rising to international fame. Their writing was strongly influenced by opera and reflects the Italian taste of the time; it is also present in their religious compositions. Les Muffatti and the South-African countertenor Clint van der Linde present works of exceptional expressive power, with Hasse’s Hostes Averni and Porpora’s Nisi Dominus being recorded here for the first time.

Saint-Saëns's first opera, Le Timbre d'argent initially composed in 1864 need not fear comparison with some of the most celebrated works in the nineteenth-century French repertory. It depicts the nightmare of a man whose hallucinations anticipate by twenty years the fantastical apparitions of Offenbach's Les Contes d Hoffmann.

The dance permeated every layer of Romantic society. From popular dance halls to courtly salons, people showed their public face, enjoyed themselves and met one another in waltz time or to the rhythms of the quadrille or the polka. At the same time, ballet gained unprecedented fame on the stage of the Paris Opéra. The music that accompanied this frantic round in France has long been neglected, whereas the Viennese have never ceased to celebrate their waltzes. Under the expert baton of François-Xavier Roth, the orchestra Les Siècles has set out to rediscover this French repertory using historical instruments. Their album explores the output of both established composers – Camille Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet – and their colleagues who specialised in Terpsichorean entertainment, including Philippe Musard, Isaac Strauss, Émile Waldteufel and Hervé.

André Cardinal Destouches (1672-1749) was educated by the Jesuits and had a career as a Musketeer before resigning to study music with André Campra. His first ‘hit’ was the pastoral Issé in 1697, which was written for the court but immediately taken up by the Opéra in Paris. He rose to prominent positions in both contexts and Sémiramis was first performed in 1718. Influenced by the Italophile Campra, Destouches abandoned the traditional five-part string scoring of Lully and his followers and created a work that was perhaps too serious for its time: only now are we in a position to recognise his work as an important step along the road from the aesthetic of Lully to that of Rameau.