Philippe Katerinecomme Disait ma Petite Sœur

This album of Baroque cantatas and chamber duets grew out of a 2007 performance of Stefano Landi's 1631 opera Il Sant'Alessio starring Philippe Jaroussky and Max Emanuel Cencic (among the eight countertenors in the cast) with William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants. Christie was so impressed with the blend of Jaroussky and Cencic's voices that he brought them together to explore the vast and rarely performed repertoire of late 17th and early 18th century Italian duets for equal voices.

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.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) left two very different versions of his tragédie en musique Zoroastre: the first, in 1749, suffered from cabals and the work was withdrawn from the repertory. Rameau gave it a thoroughgoing revision in 1756. At this time, he was at the height of his powers. Melody, harmony, orchestration and choral writing no longer held any secrets for him. Zoroastre brought still further innovation. For the first time, he dispensed with a prologue, and turned the overture into a philosophical ‘programme’, the struggle between day and night, between good and evil. The 1749 version is entirely governed by avant-garde ideas; Zoroastre resembles Tamino in Die Zauberflöte, but two generations earlier. This disconcerted some of the audience: Zoroastre was a moral, social and philosophical opera.

At the height of the famous Querelle des Bouffons (1754), the elderly Rameau yielded to insistent requests from the Académie Royale de Musique for a major revision of Castor and Pollux, 17 years after the lukewarm reception of its premiere. He deleted the Prologue and made substantial modifications to the dramatic structure, with a completely new first act! But the original has continued to overshadow the revision, unjustly so when one considers the modernity of its orchestration. The inspired direction of Raphaël Pichon shows the extent to which this music heralds the Classical orchestra.

John Eliot Gardiner has proved himself a doughty champion of the later French Baroque, cultivating credible performing methods and unearthing undeservedly neglected repertoire. … "Les Boreades" recorded in 1982. Viewed by many as one of the greatest of Rameau's operas, the score is both dramatically effective and a riot of orchestral colour. Gardiner conducts with a real feeling for the way in which instrumental timbre underpins the drama, while in a strong cast Philip Langridge is both stylish and superbly theatrical as Abaris.

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.

Collegium Vocale Gent and its founder Philippe Herreweghe continue their recordings of the works of Carlo Gesualdo with ‘Silenzio Mio’, which contains the Fourth Book of Madrigals, published in 1596. Regarded as one of the most eccentric composers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but also one of the most creative, he experiments here with new melodic and harmonic effects that enthralled listeners of the time. These innovations are applied to poems by Alessandro Guarini and several anonymous writers, all of which focus on the expression of personal feelings, particularly a ‘pathos’ new on the literary scene. A veritable historical testimony to the artistic turning point that occurred at the court of Ferrara in the early seventeenth century, this fourth book takes its place in the long-term recording project of Collegium Vocale, hailed by critics for its ‘homogeneity, contrapuntal transparency and luminosity, strikingly evident even in the most tormented pieces’ (Diapason).

The story of rival factions, divine interventions, and love triumphing over obstacles political and personal clearly inspired some of Rameau's most adventurous musical evocations (just one example might be the fascinating harmonic language he uses to depict a magician commanding an eclipse). It's this spirit of daring experiment that Rameau expert Marc Minkowski relishes throughout this magnificent, high-octane, deftly tailored account. He fires the authentic-instrument group Les Musiciens du Louvre into his customary whiplash speeds, which are just perfect for the air of martial excitement that prevails, while the many dance-centered numbers have a muscular grace. The result in general is some of his best work to date on disc, with a special emphasis on the through line of the score.