Les Boréades

Jean Salomon (stage name Tabarin) was one of Molière’s predecessors.

With their usual playful spirit, Les Boréades offers a varied sampling of the theatrical music heard in Paris at the beginning of the 17th century. The composers featured include Beaulieu and Praetorius.

Francis Colpron has been recognised as one of the most talented recorder players in Canada and around the world. His musical qualities and his capacity to innovate both in the artistic and interpretive spheres have been acclaimed by the public and critics alike. This CD includes a wide variety of sinfonias and concertos for recorder, oboe and violin by some of the best known baroque composers.

Naturally Telemann offers some of the composer’s most elegant, ingenious and spirited instrumental music. Two concertos feature the recorder and the transverse flute in novel instrumentations that yield unique combinations of tone. These works are paired with the cantata Seele, lerne dich erkennen for soprano and recorder ensemble, and the Sonata in B flat major for recorders and continuo. Naturally Telemann shows off the composer’s great stylistic range as he adapted his idiom to the times, indeed helped shape the music of a new era.

This new offering consists of sonatas and concertos for recorder, violins and continuo composed by Alessandro Scarlatti in 1725, the year of his death. Scarlatti’s recorder works are at once intellectual and sensual, and are presumed to have been composed for recorder virtuoso Joachim Quantz on the occasion of his visit to Naples.

Founded by Francis Colpron in 1991, period ensemble Les Boréades de Montréal has made more than a dozen recordings for the ATMA label. The ensemble’s most recent ATMA recording — music by Henry Purcell with soprano Karina Gauvin — was nominated for a 2007 Juno Award.

This specially priced sampler features Montreal’s period ensemble Les Boréades performing music by French, Italian, English, and German Baroque composers."Les Boréades treats us to an orchestral sound of lovely sonority... The many soloists are remarkable... The opening chorus demands a perfection of intonation, articulation, and homogeneity that culminates in the closing phrases."

Following the resounding success of their first two Beatles Baroque albums, Montréal’s Les Boréades are back with their latest in the collection of Beatles tunes on early instruments.

For the majority of music lovers up until the 1820s, the name Bach didn’t conjure up Johann Sebastian, as is the case today, but rather one of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who worked successively in Berlin and in Hamburg. He was indeed one of the most influential composers of his time and his particular qualities made him one of the precursors of musical Romanticism.