Pierre Gallon

With this recital dedicated to German songs by Joseph Haydn, Alice Foccroulle and Pierre Gallon leave their familiar territory - that of Baroque music - and present a personal, thoroughly informed interpretation of these songs, free of the many layers of varnish that have built up over the centuries on these little treasures of vocal music. It is free of the many layers of varnish that have been applied to these little treasures of vocal music over the centuries. Alice Foccroulle is accompanied partly by harpsichord, partly by pianoforte, and leads us across the narrow ridge between the Baroque and the Classical periods. The listener is invited into the Viennese salons of the late 18th century, where love songs and little philosophical or religious tales in German are performed in domestic settings. They are characterised by tenderness, intensity and humour, sometimes with a touch of cynicism. All in all, Haydn shows himself here from an intimate side, impressively realising the zeitgeist of an epoch in a state of transformation.

Pierre Gallon and Matthieu Boutineau offer us an opportunity to rediscover Couperin’s Concerts Royaux in a version for two harpsichords, a rare combination, yet one of which the composer to the Sun King was especially fond. Here is an interpretation at once brilliant and moving of these works full of tenderness, gaiety and invention, a veritable stylistic turning point between the twilight of the Grand Siècle and the dawn of the Enlightenment.

In this new release, Vincent Dumestre’s Le Poème Harmonique once again immerses us in the France of the second half of the 16th century, which witnessed the emergence of new centres of artistic activity. These ‘bourgeois’ societies were initiated by patron princes concerned with building their prestige through the arts and letters just as much as by arms. At the same time, refined circles held by cultivated women enabled them to rub shoulders with the leading poets of the time, as well as musicians sensitive to humanist research, all profiting from a context propitious to the invention of new artistic forms and practices.