In 1743, two years before Rameau’s Platée, Boismortier created an extraordinarily modern and madcap "comic ballet", Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse. As the exuberant plotunfurls, Cervantes’ hero encounters monsters, enchanters, princesses and people from Japan, making for plenty of offbeat and audacious dances and choruses. Musical beautyrubs shoulders with satirical and irreverent comedy. A choice work for Hervé Niquet, who leads his Concert Spirituel with unparalleled energy! © Château de Versailles Spectacles

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

To say that André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry's 1784 comic opera, Richard Coeur de Lion, has a lot to answer for is something of an understatement, when it was its popular Act I air, “O Richard, O my King”, which in 1789 accidentally brought about one of the defining moments of the French Revolution: the air is sung by the imprisoned King Richard's knights who want to free him, and one night in 1789 it became the song French officers chose to sing to King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette under house arrest at Versailles after the couple turned up to greet the officers at a banquet thrown in the Royal Opera House; which in turn got interpreted by the Paris press as an anti-revolutionary act, leading to the palace being stormed and the royal couple taken away, never to return. Add the fact that Grétry was none other than Marie-Antoinette's favourite composer, and the opera was an obvious choice for the Royal Opera House's 250th anniversary season. Plus, the October 2019 production under the direction of Hervé Niquet was a wonderful one: fizzing with vivacious energy and fun, nailing its grandeur and intimacy in equal measure, all with just the right dose of heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, and from a no-exceptions superb cast of young talent - headed up by tenors Rémy Mathieu as Richard and Reinoud Van Mechelen as Blondel - supported by an on-fire Le Concert Spirituel. So, although with this live recording you don't get to enjoy the production's sumptuous late eighteenth century stage sets and concerts, the music making was of a level for it all still to be leaping out of the stereo regardless. What's more, the polished, immediate engineering has done a magnificent job of capturing the theatre's acoustics, meaning you really do feel as if you're sat there in the theatre's best seats. Then, while one might imagine that non-French speakers may get less out of the audio alone, given that the opera's action moves forwards not via sung recitatives but instead spoken texts, the reality is that the vim and melodious tones with which those spoken lines are dispatched actually amounts to a sort of music in itself. In short, thank goodness they snuck this one in before Covid, because it's a life-affirming triumph. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

Jules Verne was the inspiration for Offenbach’s opéra-féerie, premiered in 1875. The Parisian craze for this type of musical extravaganza stemmed from its impressive stage effects: for Le Voyage dans la Lune, two ballets and some twenty sets took the audience from the Earth to the Moon, successively recreating the Paris Observatory, a working blast furnace and the crater of an erupting volcano. The piece is studded with zany characters and imaginary places: a lunar landscape, a glass palace, mother-of-pearl galleries, etc. The producers even borrowed a dromedary and an ostrich from the zoo at the Jardin d’Acclimatation! To accompany this theatrical display, Offenbach composed a series of colourful, picturesque hit numbers, wittily and energetically performed here by a team of enthusiastic soloists. The Chœur et Orchestre National Montpellier Occitanie are placed under the subtle and precise direction of Pierre Dumoussaud. © Bru Zane

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Fauré's Requiem, “funeral lullaby” written for enjoyment as the composer put it, has a unique place in history. It's soft, simple and modest poetry conveys moments of gentle contemplation and moving expressiveness which are entrusted to both the choir and the two soloists. With his Ensemble Aedes and the orchestra Les Siècles, Mathieu Romano is committed to render a Requiem faithful to its first performance. We hear thus the score in its original 1893 orchestration, where the organ plays a great role, and where Latin is pronounced in the French way as it used to be. The clearest articulation of the Ensemble Aedes then perfectly fits Éluard’s Figure humaine set to music by Francis Poulenc. We have never heard these sublime poems sung with such intelligibility before! Finally, the three Songs by Debussy elegantly close the album. Here again, the quality and clarity of the voices are stunning. Artistic director and founder of Ensemble Aedes has established himself as a magician of voices in a cappella scores. And voices ideally melt with the strings of Les Siècles under his baton. A 100% French cast in a 100% French music disc for a triple rediscovery. Essential! © Aparté

As the symbiosis between the art of the poet and that of the composer, the French mélodie became the jewel of the salons of the ‘Belle Époque’. By placing a string quartet and a piano around the singer, Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, Lekeu’s Nocturne and Fauré’s La Bonne Chanson oscillate between chamber musical intimacy and orchestral ambition. Alongside these famous pioneering pieces, this programme devised by the Palazzetto Bru Zane champions a return to the art of transcription, so popular in the nineteenth century, with the aim of expanding the repertory for voice, strings and piano in order to unearth some forgotten treasures. Hence Hahn, Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, La Tombelle, Ropartz, Louiguy and Messager all appear in a programme whose guiding thread is the emotions of nocturnal abandonment: the charms of twilight, the trajectory of dreams, the terror of nightmare or the exhilaration of festive occasions. Alexandre Dratwicki has made these arrangements in the style of the nineteenth century. Appropriately enough, the programme ends with La Vie en rose, for this music offers a kaleidoscope of all the colours of human feeling. The texture of solo strings and piano sets Véronique Gens’s incomparable storytelling artistry in a new ligh. © Alpha Classics

The gestation of this project lasted two years. Anna Prohaska and Julius Drake finally concentrated their research on the themes of Eve, Paradise and banishment. Some songs were obvious choices, such as Fauré’s Paradis, in which God appears to Eve and asks her to name each flower and animal, or Purcell’s Sleep, Adam, sleep with its references to Genesis. But Anna Prohaska also wished to illustrate the cliché of the woman who brought original sin into the world and her status as a tempter who leads man astray, as in Brahms’s Salamander, Wolf’s Die Bekehrte or Ravel’s Air du Feu. In Das Paradies und die Peri, Schumann conjures up the image of Syria’s rose-covered plains. Bernstein also transports us to the desert with Silhouette.. John Milton’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Paradise Lost was the inspiration for Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten, also featured in this very rich programme that constitutes an invitation to travel and reflection. © Alpha Classics