Bellérophon

Lully's opera Bellérophon was revived this year in the occasion of the Festival de Beaune. It had been created in 1679 in Paris (Palais Royal) and hadn't been performed since the XVIIIth century.
Some audio samples of the opera (the prologue and the beginning of the second act) are on display here (at the end of the article).

Althought it was not Lully's first opera, it was the first of Lully's opera scores to be printed.
A copy of the original edition by Christophe Ballard can be found at the UNT Digital library.
(The UNT Digital Library is a great ressource for anyone interested in the history of music).

Isis & Atys

A word about two books released recently, the english translation and adaptation of two librettos by Philippe Quinault (1635-1688) : Isis and Atys.
The translator is Frank J. Morlock who also translated many other French plays. All the books are available on Amazon. Have a look at them and you'll be amazed at the authors, the themes, and at the wealth of French plays now available in English thanks to Frank and his publishers.

Revival of Lully's 'Atys'

Now, it's sure : we shall have a revival of Atys with the 'historical' 1987 staging by Jean-Marie Villégier !
It will be performed by William Christie and LAF, and the opera will be given in Paris (salle Favart), Caen, Bordeaux, Versailles and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music...
And that's not all : a DVD is planned.
All this was made possible thanks to Ronald P. Stanton who sponsored the production.

Hippolyte et Aricie - Isny Oper Festival

Isny Oper Festival

Lully - 'Bellerophon' World Premiere

Bellérophon (1679), stage decoration by Carlo Vigarani

The world premiere of Lully's Bellerophon will take place in July during the Festival de Beaune, under the baton of Christophe Rousset.

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The author of the libretto was Thomas (de Lisle) Corneille who, in that occasion, learned how hard it was to write an opera, especially an opera for Lully. At that time, Philippe Quinault, Lully's favourite librettist, was in exile because of Madame de Montespan's reaction to their opera Isis. She had got him banned from the court because she thought he had voluntarily ridiculed her by portraying her as the jealous and vindictive Juno.

Lecerf de la Vieville wrote about Corneille's experience : "Lully was constantly driving him to desesperation. For a 500- or 600-verse play, monsieur de Lisle had to write 2000 verses..." Corneille later stated that he'd rather write ten tragedies than an opera.

Actually, Corneille couldn't manage to write the libretto on his own and asked Fontelle and Boileau for their help. It took three authors, time, and lots of arguments with Lully to replace Quinault.

The libretto was good, but, after that difficult experience, and pressured by Lully, the king found wiser to get Quinault back for the next productions.

Bellerophon was performed for the first time at the Palais Royal (Paris), on January 31, 1679, and met with huge success.

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Other Lully related program in Beaune : L'exotisme à la Cour de Louis XIV (Exoticism at the Court of Louis XIV), arias and musics by Lully, Cavalli & Moulinie, performed by Le Poeme Harmonique under Vincent Dumestre.

Dardanus - Opéra de Lille

Jean-Philippe RAMEAU - DARDANUS
October, 16, 18, 20, 22,24, 2009
Opéra de Lille

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Le Concert d'Astrée
Emmanuelle Haïm

Claude Buchvald, Staging
Alexandre de Dardel, Stage decoration
Daniel Larrieu, Choreography


Anders J. Dahlin, Dardanus
Ingrid Perruche, Iphise
Andrew Foster-Williams, Isménor
François Lis, Teucer
Robert Gleadow, Anténor

Opéra de Lille
Le Concert d'Astrée


Other Performances :

Théâtre de Caen : November 5 & 7, 2009
Opéra de Dijon : November 18 & 20, 2009

European Opera Centre - Auditions

Candidates are being sought for two specific European Opera Centre projects:

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Dardanus
A new version of the opera in a new production. The project will be led by Raphaël Pichon with additional musical preparation by Sébastien Daucé. Production preparation takes place in Greece in April/May 2010 leading to initial performances in Greece and Turkey. A full production and a recording are planned for Liverpool.

Leoš Janáček, La Petite renarde rusée
The European Opera Centre will record a new version in French of the award-winning animated version of The Cunning Little Vixen. With animation by Geoff Dunbar, the project is overseen musically by Kent Nagano who recorded a new orchestral sound-track with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin for the film. The film itself was created by BBC Television.

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Lyon, October 12, 2009
Information and Application Form on http://www.operaeurope.eu

Philippe Quinault - Publications & News

Philippe Quinault

Philippe Quinault was a dramatist who composed libretti for Jean-Baptiste Lully's works. Together, they created the French opera, established the genre and led it to its highest expression.
Two books dedicated to Philippe Quinault have been released this year. The first one, by William Brooks in January and the second one by Buford Norman in June.

- BROOKS, William, Philippe Quinault, Dramatist, Oxford, Bern / Berlin / Bruxelles / Frankfurt am Main / New York / Wien, Peter Lang (Medieval and Early Modern French Studies), 2009, 512 p.
ISBN 9783039115334

- NORMAN Buford, Quinault, librettiste de Lully - Le Poète des Grâces, CMBV-Mardaga, 2009, 383 p.
ISBN 9782870099957
This is the French translation, completed and updated, of Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism), published by Summa Publications, 2001.

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There is also a NEW WEBSITE dedicated to Quinault by Buford Norman. You can find it here, and it's in French.
If you can't read French but are interested in the French Parnassus monument, you'll find a picture of the Quinault medallion by Simon Curé.

Old Opera Productions Revived

Platée staged by Laurent Pelly

- Jean-Philippe RAMEAU, Platée - Les Musiciens du Louvre/Marc Minkowski - staging, Laurent Pelly
Opéra de Paris December 02-30, 2009.
Both Paul Agnew and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt will be Platée, so you can make your choice or, better, buy two tickets and enjoy both of them.
Opéra de Paris

- Jean-Baptiste LULLY, Atys, Les Arts Florissants/William Christie, in the mythical 1987 production staged by Jean-Marie Villégier - 2011 (not sure, yet - the project is still under discussion).

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The revival of old famous productions seems to be the new trend in the operatic wold. La Monnaie in Brussels recently revived Herbert Wernicke's staging of La Calisto.

Cavalli - YBOP

The Yale Baroque Opera Project (YBOP) announced a conference entitled From Page to Stage : Manuscript-Edition-Production, Readying Francesco Cavalli's Operas for the Stage, which will take place at Yale University, Whitney Humanities Center from 30 April to 2 May 2009.
The conference, which will feature musicologists, textual scholars, conductors, directors, stage designers, and theorists of drama, will coincide with a production of Cavalli's most popular opera, Giasone, by YBOP.
Yale Baroque Opera Project

The Shock of the Elements....

"Between the noise of the hell and the celestial music, between the primitive instinct and the soul, the beating of the drum reveals the life's first attempt to free itself from the blind matter" (***)

When I read the phrase, Jean-Philippe Rameau's overture to Zaïs (1757) and his use of a muffled drum in his depiction of the Creation immediately came to my mind.
I checked my dictionnaries of symbols, which confirmed that the sound of the drum is associated with the emission of the primordial sound, but in the Indian, Chinese or African traditions. So, where did Rameau find the idea of drums in the depiction of life freeing itself from the matter ?

In the French tradition, the most famous example of a piece of music on the same theme is Les Éléments by Rebel, composed in 1748. It's very impressive piece of music using dissonances, and several instruments and musical lines to symbolize the emerging elements, but no drum was involved.

The drum used by Rameau is an illustration of his deep understanding of the musical language, or/and an evidence of his incredibly wide knowledge of the various musical traditions. His interest in all kind of musics, from the ancient Greek traditions to the contemporary oriental music is documented. Rameau owned a javanese gambang.

If you have never heard the overture of Zaïs, it's time now : here it is on YouTube .

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(***) Entre le bruit de l'enfer et la musique céleste, entre l'instinctualité primitive et l'âme, la batterie de tambour témoigne du premier effort de la vie pour se dégager de la matière aveugle.
(entry "Tambour", Georges Romey, Encyclopédie de la Symbolique des rêves).

Tenducci -YSL Sale (2)

Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci reading a score
oil on canvas, ca. 1773-75
Sold for €2,193,000

This beautiful portrait of the sopranist castrato Tenducci is my second reason.
More about the painting and the castrato on Christie's

That's the auction ! You finally know where a painting was at the very moment it's about to disappear again for years !

Cavalli - Ercole Amante

Ercole... (sigh...)

Ercole Amante staged by David Alden,
or how to turn a drama into a buffoonery
Amsterdam, January 2009

It's obvious the contemporary stage directors feel ill at ease when it comes to staging ancient operas. If they can read the libretto and have a brain, it's the only way I can explain their insistence in turning all the dramas into lousy comedies. As Bergson theorised it, laughter is most of the time a sign of embarrassment rather than of fun.

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Ercole Amante was commissionned by Mazarin to celebrate the mariage of Louis XIV and Maria Teresa of Austria, and was first performed on February 7, 1662, in the new salle des Machines built in the Tuileries. The ballet, Hercule amoureux, performed between the acts to please the French public, was Lully's first great success.

The Imaginative World of Ariosto

Engraving by Larmessin after Nicolas Lancret

The Imaginative World of Ariosto
(Arioste imaginaire, Arioste imaginé)
February 26 to May 18, 2009
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Ariosto first published his Orlando Furioso in Ferrara in 1516, and the epic poem, telling the adventures of Orlando, quickly became an extraordinary source of inspiration for the arts and literature. The exhibition, featuring works from the Renaissance to the 19th century proposes a reflection on the mutual influences of images and text in artistic and literary creation.

Ariosto's work also influenced a lot the 17th &18th-century operatic world. The character and adventures of Orlando inspired various libretti, and composers like Vivaldi (Orlando Finto Pazzo and then Orlando Furioso), Scarlatti, Händel, Lully (Roland). Orlando Furioso's secondary characters became the central characters of some operas : Alcina (Albinoni, Händel), Ginevra principessa di Scozia/Ariodante (Perti, Pollarolo, Sarro, Händel, Wagenseil). Even Rameau's Les Paladins, based on tale by La Fontaine finds its origins in Orlando Furioso (canto 43). For that reason, the exhibition is completed with a musical program.

Concerts
Extracts from :
Händel, Orlando, Alcina, Ariodante
Lully, Roland Furieux,
Vivaldi, Orlando Furioso
Solistes de l'Atelier lyrique de l'Opéra national de Paris :
Les Paladins & Jérôme Correas
Auditorium du Louvre - March 4, 2009
Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar - March 6, 2009
More about the concerts


Filmed operas
Alcina, by Georg Friedrich Händel
Scottish Chamber Orchestra - Raymond Leppard,
Chorale Elisabeth Brasseur - Catherine Brilli,
Cast :Ann Murray, Valerie Masterson, Christiane Eda Pierre, Theresa Berganza, Philip Landridge.
Ina/Antenne 2, 1978, 124 min.
Introduction speech on the theme Ariosto and the baroque opera.
March14, 2009 - 3:00 pm

Orlando Furioso, by Antonio Vivaldi
Orchestre de l’Opéra de San Francisco - Randall Behr,
Cast : Marilyn Horne, Kathleen Kuhlmann, Susan Patterson, Jeffrey Gall, Sandra Walker.
Réal : Brian Large, prod : Arthaus, 1989, 147 min.
March 14, 2009 - 7:00 pm

Les Paladins, by Jean-Philippe Rameau
Les Arts florissants - William Christie,
Opus Arte, 2005, 140 min.
March15, 2009 - 3:00 pm

Orphée

Last week-end, I attended a performance of Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice by Jérôme Correas and Les Paladins at the Château de Boucard, a Renaissance to XVIIth century building. There is no most wonderful experience than enjoying all the refinements of classical music in such a bucolic place.

The contrast between this picture and the one below is... baroque,
and summarises well the experience.

Given the size of the room and the tiny stage it was impossible to have a whole orchestra, so we had a transcription for chamber orchestra prepared by Jérôme Correas. That's the magic of the festivals, some artists come and perform and the year after they are back with some incredible concerts.
I was very curious about the experience, for I had attended the full performance by Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre when they recorded it, and I was wondering how a chamber version, with 7 musicians instead of 35 and a small choir, would sound.

It worked rather well. Jérôme's version really gave us the feeling we were back in a 18th-century salon, listening to a private performance of the opera. The transcriptions were a very common way to enjoy the great works at that time, and they still are ! I had never thought I would hear Orphée call Eurydice in the middle of the Berry fields.
The performers were good and Jérôme Correas' direction very precise and lively.

Jean-François Lombard was Orphée

and Kareen Durand, Eurydice

Gluck's music is thrilling, especially in the tragic scenes but, as I spent part of July listening to Monteverdi's Orfeo, I found the decline in the operatic and artistical taste between Monterverdi and Gluck striking. When the version given by Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio is strong with a genuine sense of sacred which can compare with the greek myths, the Gluck/Calzabigi's one is soppy and indulges in an easy sentimentality (happy end, happy arias and dances) that weakens the work.

Gluck was opening the door to the 19th century opera and its strange mixtures of beauty and vulgar.