Audio playlist #1: Pearls of French Baroque opera

By Benoît Dratwicki, artistic director and researcher at CMBV

The French opera of the 17th and 18th centuries was a grand show machine, in which music held a central place: music supports the singers and dancers, accompanies the choirs, underlines the theatrical scenery changes, depicts various atmospheres, it is in turn poetic, dramatic and choreographic. The CMBV offers you a journey to the heart of this kaleidoscopic repertoire, through masterpieces and rarities interpreted by the greatest specialists of the French style.

« Zoroastre » is one of Rameau's major works: for the first time, the composer imagines a program opening (opposing good and evil forces) for the prologue. This recording is one of the most recent co-productions carried out by the CMBV: it allows us to hear the accomplishment of the conductor Alexis Kossenko’s musicological work of the applied institution. The orchestra’s size, the use of the continuo, the musician’s layout are all historical parameters that have been respected, generating a particular timbre quality and energy, raising both a thunderous and refined music.

« Passion », an album dedicated to the magical art of Véronique Gens, was conceived by the conductor Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas and the CMBV, as a miniature French baroque opera respecting its mandatory scenes. Among the most attractive sequences, the one devoted to night and sleep (Le Triomphe de l’Amour et La Diane de Fontainebleau) perfectly contrasts with the funeral pomp and the lamentation chorus from Alceste.

« The Opera of operas » imagined by the CMBV with Hervé Niquet’s Le Concert Spirituel in 2017 during their thirty years of collaboration anniversary, also presents itself as a series of highlights of Baroque opera: Dauvergne and Rameau, two grand lyrical scene authors during Louis XIV’s reign, share the celebrity and intermingle their art without it being easy to distinguish them. 

« Un Opéra pour trois rois » (“An Opera for Three Kings”), conceived by the CMBV with György Vashegyi, traces back the history of opera under Louis XIV’s, Louis XV’s and Louis XVI’s reigns: the selected music extracts alternate between pages full of passion signed Bury or Rameau, and others of a great tenderness, signed Dauverge, Rameau and Piccinni, whose Atys’ “sleep” (created in 1780) is a reference to Lully, who invented the genre a century earlier.

With « Rivales », the CMBV and Julien Chauvin retraced two prime donne’s careers of the late 18th century, Mme Saint-Huberty and Mme Dugazon, whose most inspired pages have been assigned to Véronique Gens and Sandrine Piau, two long-time friends and confidants: Monsigny and Edelmann, represented here, reveal two contrasting aspects of a musical period straddling the line between Baroque and Romanticism.

« L’opéra du Roi-Soleil » (“The Sun-King’s opera”), an album pictured by the CMBV with Alexis Kossenko to highlight Katherine Watson’s velvet voice, a singer full of sensitivity,  is an opportunity to highlight Marais and Campra through some of their masterpieces. (Ariane et Bacchus, Alcyone, L’Europe galante, Idoménée).

Finally, this playlist reports on the wonderful project undertaken by Reinoud van Mechelen , supported by the CMBV, to rehabilitate the great figures of the French countertenor voice under the Ancien Régime. The first two volumes bear witness to the refinement of the scores composed for Dumesny at the time of Louis XIV and for Jéliote at the time of Louis XV, by some authors such as Desmarest, Mondonville or La Borde.