The Harmonic Poem, Vincent Dumestre Piacere Dell'amore

Armide was Lully and Quinault's last tragedie lyrique: undoubtedly Quinault's finest dramatic achievement, and the culmination of the tragedie en musique conceived by Lully, who died the year after its creation. Never has language appeared so beautiful and tragic in Lully's music, and the drama of this Christian knight falling in love with the sorceress who refuses to kill him was so deeply felt that it remained on stage for a century! Here, Vincent Dumestre passionately conducts Lully's last masterpiece, whose eponymous character, played by the immense Stephanie d'Oustrac, never ceases to bewitch us.

After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imberts album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release.

When one looks at the biographies of famous prima donnas, the suspicion sometimes arises that opera is not really an art form but a way of life. At any rate, for many of its protagonists, the theatrics, the scheming and the scandalmongering of the stage appear to flow seamlessly into real life. And the situation in the eighteenth century was no different from today.

This album concluded the first part of our work on the French air de cour, begun in 1999; it is the last of a triptych devoted to the most famous composers in the genre, Estienne Moulinié, Pierre Guédron and Anthoine Boesset. The secular output of the last-named comprises 230 airs – much more than that of the other two, but still very little for a musical career of forty years or so. This is partly explained by Boesset’s perfectionism, as he confirms in the preface to his Eighth Book of 1632: „Yet I take the liberty of presenting these Airs, which are not a great many, coming as they do from one who willingly leaves quantity to others, and who works for the elite rather than the masses.“

Allegri’s Miserere, its heartbreaking harmonies, its verses alternately chanted and ornamented, its seraphic voices: sheer Baroque magic. Since its composition in Rome in 1630, the work has constantly been transformed. Le Poème Harmonique approaches the score through the prism of its metamorphoses, the ornaments and transpositions added since the time when Mozart himself transcribed the piece, then jealously guarded by the Vatican, which punished publication of it with anathema. From the Renaissance onwards, musicians dressed up the finest secular tunes of their time in sacred words.

A profound exploration of the simple numerical ratios that underlie our solar system, its musical harmony, and our earliest religious beliefs