The musical world owes a debt of gratitude to French conductor Christophe Rousset not only for the vital, exquisite performances he delivers with the ensembles Les Talens Lyriques and Choeur de Chambre de Namur, but for his work in bringing to light neglected masterpieces of Baroque opera. Lully's Bellérophon, premiered in 1679, was a huge success in its time, with an initial run of nine months. Part of its popularity was doubtless due to the parallels that could be drawn between its plot and certain recent exploits of Louis XV, but even the earliest critics recognized the score's uniqueness and exceptional quality within Lully's oeuvre, so it's perhaps surprising that it has never been recorded before. The distinctiveness of the music was likely a result at least in part of the fact that Lully's preferred librettist Philippe Quinault was out of favor at the court of Louis XV at the time, so the composer turned to Thomas Corneille for the libretto, and Corneille's literary and dramatic styles were so different from Quinault's that Lully was nudged out of his comfort zone and had to develop new solutions to questions of structure and the marrying of music to text. It is the first opera for which Lully composed fully accompanied recitatives, and that alone gives it a textural richness that surpasses his earlier works. The composer also allows soloists to sing together, something that was still a rarity in Baroque opera. There are several duets and larger ensembles; the love duet, "Que tout parle à l'envie de notre amour extreme!," is a ravishing expression of passion and happiness, as rhapsodic as anything in 19th century Italian opera. The level of musical inventiveness throughout is exceptional even for Lully; the expressiveness of the recitatives, the charm of the instrumental interludes, the originality of the choruses, and the limpid loveliness of the airs make this an opera that demands attention. Rousset and his forces give an outstanding performance that's exuberantly spirited, musically polished, rhythmically springy, and charged with dramatic urgency. The soloists are consistently of the highest order. Cyril Auvity brings a large, virile, passionate tenor to the title role and Céline Scheen is warmly lyrical as his lover Philonoë. Ingrid Perruche is fiercely powerful as the villain, Stéenobée, and Jean Teitgen is a secure, authoritative Apollo. Soloists, chorus, and orchestra are fluent in the subtle inflections of French middle Baroque ornamentation. The sound of the live recording is very fine, with a clean, immediate, realistic ambience. This is a release that fans of Baroque opera will not want to miss. Highly recommended. © TiVo

André Campra has the distinction of being the most prominent French opera composer in the decades between Lully and Rameau, but even the operas of those two great masters are so rarely performed or recorded that it's not surprising that Campra's are virtually unknown to modern audiences. That makes this very fine recording with Hervé Niquet leading Choeur et Orchestre du Concert Spirituel and Les Chantres du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles all the more valuable and welcome to fans of the French Baroque. Campra enthusiastically embraced the innovations of Italian opera, particularly the da capo aria, that Lully had scorned. The plot of Le Carneval de Venise (obviously) even takes place in Italy in an opera theater preparing a performance, and it involves an opera within an opera; it concludes with a performance of an operatic divertissement in Italian, Orfeo nell'inferi, in which Campra unabashedly adopts Italian conventions. The French sections are similar in sound and style to Lully's operas-ballets even though Campra doesn't have Lully's genius for simple, memorable melody. Orfeo nell'inferi very skillfully uses the florid manner of late 17th century opera, and the juxtaposition of the two styles, while intriguing to modern ears, must have been absolutely revolutionary to French audiences who were finally exposed to the innovations of Italian opera. The singers, chorus, and orchestra are skilled in both the Italian and French conventions of Middle Baroque performance practice and they offer a compelling account of the piece. The orchestra and the chorus (which is used very prominently in the French sections) play and sing with precision and lively energy. Niquet's tempos are fluid and he maintains a strong sense of momentum throughout. The soloists are never less than adequate and several stand out, particularly sopranos Salomé Haller and Sarah Tynan, tenor Mathias Vidal, baritone Andrew Foster-Williams, and bass Luigi de Donato. Glossa's sound is characteristically immaculate present and beautifully balanced. © TiVo

Maurice Ravel's orchestral works are universally regarded as models of the art of orchestration, and this 4-CD box set from Deutsche Grammophon presents them complete, in stupendous live performances by Lionel Bringuier and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich. These recordings, made between 2014 and 2015, capture every aspect of Ravel's genius, from the colorful transcriptions of his piano pieces to works composed specifically for orchestra. While the ever-popular Boléro is a textbook example of how to use tone colors for a cumulative effect, such lavish pieces as the ballets Daphnis et Chloé and La Valse are sumptuous in their lush textures and vibrant sonorities. Bringuier is an enthusiastic advocate for Ravel's music, and his expertise is apparent in his meticulous interpretations and in the precision of the musicians, who play with rhythmic accuracy and polished execution. Featured soloists in these performances are the virtuoso pianist Yuja Wang, who is exciting in the Piano Concerto in G major and the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major, and violinist Ray Chen, who delivers a compelling reading of Tzigane. In the remaining selections, the Tonhalle shines with brilliant luster, and Deutsche Grammophon's reproduction is first-rate, with its depth, detail, and dynamic range approaching audiophile quality.© TiVo

Maurice Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin has sometimes been paired with music by its namesake, naturally enough, but here, pianist Martin James Bartlett expands the concept a bit, adding Rameau at the beginning, some little two-piano pieces by Reynaldo Hahn and Ravel's apocalyptic La valse as a grand finale. The result is that he looks outward from the neoclassic world, catching the memorial function of Le tombeau de Couperin (the work's six movements memorialize friends of the composer killed in World War I) and carrying overtones of the whole world that vanished with the war. The inclusion of the pair of two-piano pieces from Le ruban dénoué by the intensely nostalgic Hahn intensifies the mood. Bartlett's tone is measured, avoiding sentiment and holding to an elevated aesthetic. His La valse has an impact that is all the greater in this context. Ravel denied that this work was a symbolic representation of the decline of the old central European culture or of anything else, but one might rejoin that he did not have to realize it for this to be so. Hahn plays the work in its single-piano arrangement, made by Ravel. This is not often heard, due not only to its sheer difficulty but also because of its swirling density. Having introduced the second piano of Alexandre Tharaud in the Hahn works, Bartlett could easily have kept it on for the Ravel. However, his decision was intelligent; the single-piano arrangement has an overwhelming quality that works very well here. This is an unusually cohesive and powerful program, beautifully performed, and the album landed on classical best-seller lists in early 2024.© James Manheim /TiVo

Denied early in his career by Philharmonia Orchestra's management, Sir Simon Rattle realized his dream of programming a concert of these three early Stravinsky ballets in a 2017 festival that launched his time as the music director of the venerable London Symphony Orchestra. It is indeed an interesting concept as the audience is given a chance to hear the harmonic and stylistic changes of Stravinsky's writing in these ballets, which were, incredibly, written within five years. All three of these works were premiered at Paris' Ballets Russes. The Firebird, which premiered in 1910, launched a productive relationship between Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, the company's founder. The music of The Firebird stole the show, prompting the composer to craft his own suites from the score, and it remains among his most popular and enduring works. After the success of The Firebird, Stravinsky began to compose The Rite of Spring, but he set it aside to work on a konzertstück for piano and orchestra with the images of a puppet come to life in mind. This imagery put the story of Petrushka in the eye of Diaghilev. Petrushka is set at an 1830s Shrovetide Fair and follows the exploits of a puppeteer who brings three puppets (Petrushka, the Moor, and the Ballerina) to life with his flute. Stravinsky uses folk songs cleverly throughout and departs from the more Rimsky-Korsakov-influenced writing of The Firebird, including the use of bitonality, which he took even further in The Rite of Spring. The Rite depicts a paganistic sacrifice to usher in spring, and its use of pulsating rhythms and brash harmonies famously created an uproar at its debut (the level of which is still debated). Rattle and the London Symphony perform Stravinsky's later revised versions of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, and all three powerful and highly emotional works are well executed. © TiVo

While Mozart was largely overlooked in the French capital, Antonio Salieri took on the reigns of the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris Opera), a fruitful collaboration that was completely broken up by the French Revolution. After the success of his work Les Danaïdes, composed for Paris in 1784, Salieri worked tirelessly with Beaumarchais, spurred on by the success and scandal of his Figaro, on a new project which would become Tarare. Beaumarchais moved himself shamelessly toward stardom, skillfully self-promoting and attending rehearsals so as to assure that the orchestra played pianissimo to emphasize the primacy of his verse during performances. Beaumarchais found that the music was too overwhelming to “embellish the lyrics”.Created one year after Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (which was relatively well-received in Vienna before triumphing in Prague), Tarare was an immense success in Paris maintaining the status of the composer’s repertoire despite the political turmoil of the time before disappearing from view around 1826, thereon ceasing to be played. Beaumarchais’ words were immediately adapted into Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte to be performed and met with equal success in Vienna. Tarare is half lyrical tragedy, half comic opera with a hint of orientalism.After resuscitating Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Christophe Rousset finished off his series of recordings dedicated to Salieri’s French operas for the Parisian public. Tarare is very much of its time, that of the Lumières, and used the power of art to challenge despotism in all its forms. Thanks to Christophe Rousset’s excellent delivery and lively direction, this recording enables one to judge the merits of the composition and the chasm that separates an honest and talented musician from a solitary and impassioned one like Mozart. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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The performances on this lovely album of vocal and instrumental music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier make it a recording that should delight the composer's fans and anyone who loves the music of the Baroque. Listeners should be warned that the packaging and even the composer's titles create expectations of music of a very different character from what is actually presented. The three Leçons de Ténèbres of the title, scored for bass and chamber orchestra, refer to baleful texts taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah describing the fall and abasement of Jerusalem, and were written for services on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week, the darkest days in the Christian liturgical calendar. Rather than emphasizing the texts' dire pronouncements of God's wrath, Charpentier's music expresses a gentle compassion for Jerusalem in music that's comfortingly benevolent, full of light rather than darkness. It's a brilliantly counterintuitive but legitimate take on the meaning of the texts. Charpentier was certainly capable expressing profound grief and wrote some of the most wrenching, anguished music of his era, but here he offers a message of hope and reassurance in the darkest season of the Church year. Much of the other music included in the album, all written for liturgical use, is also essentially positive, in major keys and with perky tempos. It complements the tone of the Leçons de Ténèbres, but hardly fulfills the expectations of the album's packaging, which features Caravaggio's dark painting of an emaciated St. Jerome next to a skull. Bass Stephan Macleod is resonant, agile, and warmly expressive in the Leçons and in a very odd unaccompanied motet, Pour plusieurs martyrs, whose music is hardly as somber as its title would imply. Alexis Kossenko, best known as a transverse flute virtuoso, leads the Polish Baroque chamber orchestra Arte dei Suonatori in supple, beautifully nuanced performances. The orchestral sound is sweet and mellow, thanks in part to the prominent use of recorders and transverse flutes and the warm but focused string tone. The sound is clean and present with an expansive cathedral-like ambience, marred only by too-close miking of the winds, which makes gulping intakes of air distractingly prominent.© TiVo