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Keyboard duels have had a long tradition, giving rise to many anecdotes and legends. As early as 1709, Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) and George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) had an organ and harpsichord contest at the house of Cardinal Ottoboni in Rome. It ended in a draw. More than eighty years later, around Christmas 1781, Emperor Joseph II invited Muzio Clementi (1752–1832) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) to a musical duel in Vienna. Officially, the outcome was undecided, but secretly Mozart was considered the winner. Clementi praised Mozart in the highest terms, while the latter attested that his adversary had “not an ounce of feeling or taste”. Still, the theme of the Clementi’s Sonata (in B-flat major op. 24/2) stayed with Mozart for so long that ten years later he borrowed it for the overture to The Magic Flute.

Armide, premiered in 1686, was the last joint work of Lully and the poet Philippe Quinault. It immediately became a pillar of the Opéra's repertory, which it finally left only in 1766, when it was removed to make room for a new wave of composers, Philidor, Grétry, Gossec and soon Gluck.

Miles Davis had publicly called him a madman. Leonard Bernstein found him, for his part, completely awesome. Few were those that didn’t have a definitive opinion on Ornette Coleman. Some kind of outlaw who preferred playing his own compositions rather than jazz classics, the American saxophonist also developed harmolodics, a theory uniting harmonics and melody. This box of ten discs compiles one of the most important era in the career of his author. Between 1959 and 1961, he released six studio albums for the Atlantic label. Six albums that are present here and spiced up with alternative takes and various bonuses, all of this of course impeccably remastered by John Webber. Albums included: The Shape Of Jazz To Come (1959), Change Of The Century (1959), This Is Our Music (1960), Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), Ornette! (1961) and Ornette On Tenor (1961), and the compilations The Art Of Improvisers (1970), Twins (1971), To Whom Who Keeps A Record (1975) and The Ornette Coleman Legacy (1993).

With Jean-Baptiste Stuck's Polydore, Gyorgy Vashegyi's directing talents alight once again on a French opera from the era between Lully and Rameau. Whist Louis XIV's reign was gradually drawing to a close, his nephew, duke Philippe d'Orleans - due to become regent for Louis XV on the death of the child's great-grandfather, the Sun King - was greatly expanding his own court cultural activities (within which he had a pronounced predilection for Italian music).

In 1688, the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand staged David et Jonathas, a lyrical tragedy written by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Intended for the school’s students and interspersed with the Latin tragedy Saul, it depicted the fratricidal friendship of David and Jonathas, at the mercy of an implacable fate and a cruel struggle for power.

At the end of the world, on the mythical island of Ogygia, while Neptune unleashes a storm, the inconsolable Calypso tries to seduce a handsome young castaway named Telemachus… Will Ulysses' son respond to the nymph's dangerous charms? Will he manage, as a humble mortal in the scheme of the gods, to escape the island where his father was once a prisoner ? A quintessential Homeric epic, Telemaque & Calypso is a flamboyant tribute to Destouches' own dramatic efficiency, and his particular attention to "lively speech" and natural declamation. After Semiramis, Sylvain Sartre continues his brilliant journey through the masterpieces of the adventurous composer and musketeer, which are now finally revealed.

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The last great tragédie en musique or “musical tragedy” of the reign of Louis XIV, Alcyone (Alcione, as the title appears in the 1706 edition) is an all-round spectacle poised between the 17th and 18th centuries. From the 17th century it takes its mythological source, its prologue in praise of the king, its high literary quality and its vocation for spectacle, combining choreography and changes of scenery.