Les Echoe

Mirare presents another fine recording by the talented ensemble Les Ombres, led jointly by group members Margaux Blanchard and Sylvain Sartre. Baroque music combines violence and gentleness, unity and plurality. This disc dedicated to the myth of Semele and Icarus combines music by Marin Marais, André Cardinal Destouches and George Frederic Handel.

Synthèse sur les principaux événements de l'histoire de France, illustrée d'anecdotes, de portraits, etc. …

Fully integrated with the musical line, the singers avoid melodrama through intimate, small gestures as if acting for screen, not stage.’ Gramophone Critics' Choice 2021 Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants conclude their exploration of this fascinating corpus. Even more than in his first books, Gesualdo here displays incredible modernity, playing in inimitable fashion on dissonances and chromaticisms. Love and death, joys and sorrows embrace and clash amid ever bolder harmonies.

Behind Brahms the titan, ambitious heir to Beethoven and Schumann, stands one of the greatest composers for the choir, an accomplice observer of Viennese customs. Love songs with a dance rhythm, the Liebeslieder Walzer express in turn desire, nostalgia, sorrow and amusement in the dialogue of hearts. To this emblematic collection, Léo Warynski joins several jewels of Brahmsian vocal art, where the colors of his Metaboles shine, accompanied here by pianists Yoan Héreau and Edoardo Torbianelli who complete the program with a selection of waltzes and Hungarian dances.

With their bold harmonies, their counterpoint of unequalled refinement and their raw emotion, the Tenebrae Responsories are the sacred counterpart to Gesualdo’s last two books of madrigals, published the same year (1611). Paul Agnew and Les Arts Florissants here prolong their critically acclaimed exploration of those six increasingly venomous collections. Their interpretation of the Responsories for Maundry Thursday subtly shifts towards the conscious dolorism of the late works of the Prince of Venosa.

This album owes its title ‘Beauté barbare’ to Telemann who described the music he discovered during a trip to Upper Silesia in 1705 as existing ‘in its true barbaric beauty’. Did he mean ‘wild’? ‘Exotic’? In any case, the composer was fascinated: ‘An attentive observer could gather from [those musicians] enough ideas in eight days to last a lifetime.’ An equally passionate admirer of folk music, whose Serbian roots link him to these cultures, François Lazarevitch has conceived this wildly swirling programme that mixes Telemann ( Concerto Polonois ) and eastern European Romani music of the eighteenth century, thanks to a collection of dance tunes from 1730 that he has unearthed. ‘What is interesting for us as Baroque performers is to try to find in the pieces of “art music” everything that is not written down, namely the energy and “swing” of the folk dances. I like the music we play not to sound like early music’, says the flautist and founder of Les Musiciens de Saint-Julien, who are joined for the occasion by a cymbalom virtuoso and a wide variety of percussion instruments.