The Chansonnier of Bayeux, a luxury manuscript for a collection of ditties. Here the pieces belong to all kinds of genres: love songs (sometimes courtly, more often bawdy), drinking songs, satires, women’s songs, others dealing with events and characters from the Hundred Years’ War (Le Roy engloys and Hellas Ollivier Vasselin). Only pious songs are not featured: even the incipit Belle tres doulce, mère Dieu surreptitiously leads to rather lewd verse. A poetical and musical contrast can be at the very heart of some songs (J’ai veu la beaulté m’amye). Some of the themes have floated through the centuries; thus the dialogue of a father and his rebellious daughter in La belle se siet, already set to music at the time of Guillaume Dufaÿ, will turn into our children’s song Ne pleure pas, Jeannette, sung to an altogether different melody. The upper classes of the late XVth century would appreciate the many sexual innuendoes and the "popular" situations referring to unhappily married women cuckolding their husbands, drunks, soldiers complaining that they have not been paid, and even a menagerie of noisy animals (a donkey in My my). No doubt the audience hugely enjoyed these stagings of country life, real or fictitious, as they did in the XIIIth century when listening to some motets and pastoral songs of trouvères. © Paraty

The remarkable Hypermnestre by Charles-Hubert Gervais is the latest unremembered early 18th-century French opera to be recorded afresh for Glossa, and conducted by György Vashegyi. Gervais was a contemporary of Campra and Destouches, learning from Lully and paving the way for Rameau and, like Marais and François Couperin, open to the Italianising trends of “les goûts réunis”. A high-quality libretto from Joseph La Font tackles the story of Hypermnestra which proved so popular in the early eighteenth century. The Glossa recording contains both the original fifth act and the major revision of it from 1717 and Vashegyi drives the whole tragedy expertly to its bitter (and not-so-bitter!) end. Musically, this “tragédie lyrique” provides powerful opportunities for the trio of leading characters, here taken by Katherine Watson (Hypermnestre), Thomas Dolié (Danaüs, her father) and Mathias Vidal (Lyncée, her betrothed), but they are ably supported by Juliette Mars, Chantal Santon-Jeffery, Manuel Núñez Camelino and Philippe-Nicolas Martin. No French opera of this time would have been complete without a generous helping of choral or instrumental music and Gervais – a master of melody, harmony and orchestration – serves these up in a dazzling set of divertissements and festive set pieces full of dances (including a massive passacaille); all this performed with great stylistic awareness and vivacity by Vashegyi’s Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir. © Glossa

This disc is part of a superb series from France's Alpha label, mostly covering early Baroque repertory, that offers handsome packaging bearing an artwork contemporary with the music on the disc, shown both complete and in detail. The painting of Bacchus and Ariadne shown here is attributed to Louis Le Nain, one of those artists you may have sprinted past in the Louvre on your way to see the Mona Lisa. After reading the informative essay here, however, you'll take more time in that gallery on your next visit. The music on the disc, as with many recordings in this series, is even less well known; the composer of most of it, Antoine Boësset (1587-1643), is not even mentioned in music history texts. He was a composer of airs de cour, court airs, for Louis XIII, and that entire genre will be new to most non-French listeners. On the evidence here, it's a treasure trove. Boësset's pieces are songs for a solo voice or a small group, accompanied by viols and lutes. They are lightly polyphonic at most, and they show the influence of Italian opera -- but it is only an accent, not the meat of the music. A few pieces are in Italian and a few in Spanish, another fashion of the day. The texts are mostly little pastoral scenes or odes to feminine beauty, aimed at exquisite exploration of a specific affect rather than at dramatic impact. There are also texted interludes from the ballet de cour and works from Boësset's contemporaries that fill out the picture of his place and time. One sacred song, Ô Dieu, is included and placed near the end, seemingly as a check on all the frivolity; it is especially lovely, as is the title track of the album, Je meurs sans mourir (I die without dying). There are also some instrumental interludes from dramatic works. The music is graceful, natural, and sensuous in the extreme.The French ensemble Le Poème Harmonique gives gentle, highly evocative performances of these works, but the real highlight, perhaps, is the booklet, which weighs in at 56 pages (half English, half French). Along with the essay on Le Nain's painting is a complete introduction to Boësset and his world. It may be tough going for the casual reader, and it takes some work to find the commentary pertaining to a specific piece if you're just thumbing through, but it offers deep context for this music and brings it fully alive even though it's completely unfamiliar. The only complaints are that, for all the care obviously lavished on the booklet, two of the pieces, numbers 14 and 15, are reversed in the track listing from how they actually appear on disc (the ordering in the track listing would have been better), and that in one of the excerpts from stage works, track 11, the group makes a questionable decision to interpolate part of another work that doesn't really fit. This album is strongly recommended for lovers of the French Baroque, and indeed for anyone who has walked slowly through the Louvre and wondered about the culture of Louis XIII and his era. You could take a course at your local university, or you could just fork over the cost of this one CD.© TiVo

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Inspired by a trip to Montreal, cult French singer/songwriter Arthur H adopted a new approach to his 14th studio album, Baba Love, recruiting an entirely new band including guitarist Joseph Chedid and Air pianist Vincent Taurelle, pursuing a more groove-laden optimistic sound and setting up his own label, Mystic Rumba, in order to release it. Composed at a friend's crowded apartment in the Bastille area of Paris, its 12 tracks include collaborations with U.S. hip-hop poet Saul Williams, award-winning actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Higelin's sister, Izia.© Jon O'Brien /TiVo