Philippe Katerinecomme Disait ma Petite Sœur

This is one of the most beautiful and best sounding records I own. A real sonic wonder by audiophile label Harmonia Mundi. Jean-Philippe Rameau ( 25 September 1683 – 12 September 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François Couperin.

Cinq ans après Atys, Armide grâce à la sensibilité de Philippe Herreweghe est l’objet d’un accomplissement rare. Depuis Cadmus (1673), Lully travaille la déclamation chantée dont le meilleur exemple ici est dans les nombreuses langueurs qui étreignent le cour d’Armide, le célèbre « Enfin il est en ma puissance » (II,4), modèle de l’art lullyste, cité par Rameau pendant la Querelle des Bouffons (1753). Voici la seconde approche de l’ouvrage par le chef flamand. La lisibilité de la progression dramatique est assurée par la définition d’un orchestre, précis, fascinant, véritable acteur. Outre Acis (passacaille finale), ouvrage ultime, aucune ouvre à part Armide, n’exprime à ce degré, l’émotivité instrumentale de Lully.

Conductor Philippe Herreweghe returns to the helm of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic for another set of Beethoven symphonies on the PentaTone label, this time the First and Third. Again presented as a multi-channel SACD hybrid disc, PentaTone's sound is clean and detailed without too much digital sterility. Unlike the album that included the Fifth Symphony and was fraught with many rhythmic peculiarities, Herreweghe's reading of the First and Third symphonies seems diligently respectful to every nuance of the score.

Hippolyte et Aricie was Rameau's first surviving lyric tragedy and is perhaps his most durable, though you wouldn't know it from the decades we had to wait for a modern recording. Now there are two: this one, conducted by Marc Minkowski, and William Christie's version on Erato. Choosing between the two is tough. Minkowski uses a smaller and probably more authentic orchestra, and with the resulting leaner sound, the performance has more of a quicksilver quality accentuated by Minkowski's penchant for swift tempos. His cast is excellent. The central lovers in the title are beautifully sung by two truly French voices, soprano Véronique Gens and especially the light, slightly nasal tenor of Jean-Paul Fourchécourt. In the pivotal role of the jealous Phèdre, Bernarda Fink is perfectly good but not in the exalted league of Christie's Lorraine Hunt. So there's no clear front-runner, but anyone interested in French Baroque opera must have at least one.

This recording includes an excellent selection from Beethoven’s many settings of Irish folksongs, with imaginative new arrangements of his accompaniments, rescored for more traditional instruments than the original piano, violin and cello. His settings are interspersed with more conventional versions of Irish and Scottish folk tunes taken from other sources. These help to highlight his remarkable ingenuity, which preserves the original character of the folksongs while elevating them to a much higher level of interest.

The present richly enjoyable CD contains five trios by Johann Gottlieb and Carl Heinrich. In some areas of the brothers’ work it is near enough impossible to know who wrote what with any certainty – as Grove puts it “problems of attribution, chronology and biographical detail remain”. Manuscript attributions usually refer simply to ‘Graun’.

I know of no Rameau work more colourful, more melodious, more replete with inventive vitality, wrote Gramophone in reviewing this 1973 premiere recording of the French Baroque masters 1735 heroic ballet Les Indes galantes. There is immense enthusiasm and spirit in this performance [and] some excellent singing Among the array of sopranos I was specially impressed by the full, bright ring of Rachel Yakar Anne-Marie Rodde: a good stylist and a clean, accurate voice, coping well with Rameaus florid detail The tenor Bruce Brewer is a real find for the lyrical French roles: his voice is very smooth and graceful In all, a set which no Rameau admirer should miss. Conducted by Rameau specialist Jean-Claude Malgoire, it is now being issued for the first time on CD.