musiques d'après le roman d'Honoré d'Urfé

L'Astrée

Released on 12/08/2008 by Alpha Classics
Main artists: Faenza Marco Horvat
Genre: Classical

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Alpha Productions' L'Astrée, performed by the early music ensemble Faenza under the direction of Marko Horvat, presents a musical counterpoint to the early seventeenth century French novel The Two Faces of Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé, published in five parts between 1607 and 1628; its author -- a gentleman soldier -- died in battle before the book achieved a final form. Not well known outside France and little remembered within, in its day it was a sensation, particularly among the nobility. The novel L'Astrée's mixture of early French history, myth, and the pastoral and courtly strongly resonated with a social environment absorbed with orderly and genteel pleasures as an escape from never-ending wars and the ravages of the plague. The book is rife with allusions to music, including poetry, references to specific dance steps, instruments, and even certain pieces, in keeping with the form of pastoral novel as established a century before by Jacopo Sannazzaro novel Arcadia. Faenza attempt to reconstruct the musical components of d'Urfé's work through locating contemporary settings of the poetry or, failing that, music that suits the rhythm of the line, and identifying sources of works mentioned in the text, presented along with a few choice readings from the novel itself.
The result sounds rather like the pop music of the early seventeenth century, and, for the most part, it is -- of the non-anonymous works listed, Jean-Henri d'Anglebert is the only recognizable name among the composers. L'Astrée is not unlike an album by the Baltimore Consort, although Faenza could stand to take an example from the crack ensemble work and consistency of Baltimore; there is a fair amount of sloppy playing here, less than well-blended vocalizing and skittish rhythmic figures that seem due to uncertainty about the pulse rather than any vagaries in the source music. Olga Pitarch and leader Marko Horvat contribute strong, even some stellar, solo turns as vocalists, yet some of the other singers are not quite so fortunate. L'Astrée will appeal to a very small audience outside France; mainly Francophiles and those already interested in d'Urfé's book. This certainly runs counter to Faenza's intentions, for as annotator Anne-Madeleine Goulet wrote, "The possibility of hearing [the lyric poems] with their music may encourage readers to approach L'Astrée, thus contributing to the rediscovery of this masterpiece of French literature." Indeed, if Faenza had taken a bit more care and made a better album, it could have had that effect, but this result is clearly secondary in interest to its source work.

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musiques d'après le roman d'Honoré d'Urfé

Marco Horvat

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