Les Tuches Quatre

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.

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.

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.