Christophe Rousset

When Francoeur and Rebel took over as directors of the Académie Royale de Musique (the Paris Opéra) in 1757, they decided to promote some of the new generation of composers. Among them was Antoine Dauvergne, who appears to have enjoyed great favour at that time. Indeed, the 1760-61 season ended with his tragédie lyrique Canente, and the following season was due to open with 'Hercule mourant'. The première had to be postponed, however, because of the death of the Duke of Burgundy and so did not take place until 3 April 1762. It received 18 performances.

Rather than take up an old libretto, Dauvergne had decided to turn to the promising young poet Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799). The latter had already worked with Rameau, but had not yet approached the tragédie lyrique genre. For 'Hercule mourant' Marmontel took inspiration from Sophocles, whose play 'Trachiniae' relates the death of Hercules, but also from 'Hercule mourant ou la Déjanira', a play also based on Sophocles and written in 1634 by Jean de Rotrou. As the chronicler for the Mercure de France pointed out, Marmontel extended the scope of French opera: he was ‘the first to have the courage to bring opera closer, in its subject matter and in the treatment thereof, to the great spectacles of ancient Greece’; furthermore, he proved beyond all doubt that opera was capable of ‘great tragic resources’.

The music, however, stirred up heated debate. Two opposing clans formed immediately and gained strength as the performances progressed. Never had Dauvergne had his skills called into question with such violence. Of course, his staunch supporters felt that Hercule was in line with his previous operas. ‘We have noted in Dauvergne’s operas, and especially in Hercule mourant, music that is as skilful, lively and virile as it is ingenious, light and stimulating in his opéra bouffon Les Troqueurs,’ Apparently later performances were more successful, Dauvergne having ‘altered the work with much good judgement and taste’.

Dauvergne’s score marked a milestone in his stylistic development. Indeed, inspired and guided by Marmontel’s libretto, he clearly aimed to take the genre in a completely new direction whilst at the same time giving one of the last tributes to the great French tragédie lyrique tradition inherited from Lully.

In her third ‘Tragédiennes’ album for Virgin Classics, French soprano Véronique Gens continues her exploration of the highways and byways of the French operatic repertoire, this time covering the late 18th and 19th centuries and with a prime focus on roles for the deeper, darker-toned female voice.

The French soprano Véronique Gens, joined once again by Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, continues her exploration of the highways and byways of the French operatic repertoire with this, her third ‘Tragédiennes’ album. It covers the late 18th and 19th centuries and travels from Carthage and Palestine to the Pyrenees, Tudor England and 16th century Germany, and alongside such names as Gluck, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Verdi (his Don Carlos, written in French for Paris), Saint-Saëns (his rarely heard Henri VIII rather than Samson et Dalila) and Massenet, features composers who no longer hold a place on the world’s operatic stages: Gossec, Méhul (much admired by Berlioz), Mermet and Kreutzer (the violinist and dedicatee of Beethoven’s sonata).

Perhaps surprisingly, Gens’ main emphasis in this recital is on arias written for mezzo soprano, but there have always been darker shades in Gens’ timbre and French composers of opera created some of their most impressive roles and arias for the deeper-toned female voice. In fact, this recital makes explicit tribute to a series of Parisian divas would today probably be classified as mezzo sopranos: Marie-Thérèse Maillard, Cornélie Falcon (who gave her name to a particular sub-category of voice – a high mezzo/deep soprano), Rosina Stoltz and Pauline Viardot. Even Marie-Constance Sass, the first singer of the magnificent soprano aria ‘Toi qui sus le néant’ from Verdi’s Don Carlos – better known in its Italian version, ‘Tu che la vanità’ and now often sung by lyric sopranos – was also the creator of the sultry ‘falcon’ role of Sélika in Meyerbeer’s l’Africaine.

That Gens can hold her own in such exalted historic company becomes clear from the BBC Music Magazine‘s assessment of her last ‘Tragédiennes’ album: “Passion, ardour, rage, tenderness – the full gamut of human expression emerges in this selection of works created for French operatic femmes fatales … Music director Christophe Rousset and soprano Véronique Gens’s second disc of musical ‘Tragediénnes’ is a thrilling mix of the familiar … and the little known … The whole makes a wonderful odyssey … Gens’s agile voice is the perfect vehicle to cope with these emotional extremes, from the enchanting to the chilling. She is never afraid to sacrifice pure beauty of sound in favour of rhetorical and dramatic effect, giving due weight to the plights, laments and plangent outpourings of these timeless, tragic heroines. Rousset coaxes some crack playing from Les Talens Lyriques, combining the immediacy and intimacy of chamber music with all the colours and intensity of a large-scale symphony orchestra.”

2CDS + BOOK

Recorded in the Opera Royal of the Chateau de Versailles, France.

This world première and eagerly anticipated release is the fruit of lengthy musicological research by Christophe Rousset. Together with a cast of great talent and breath-taking performances from Cyril Auvity and Céline Scheen, Christophe Rousset, conducting his Talens Lyriques invites us to rediscover the revelation that is Bellérophon, first performed on January 31st, 1679.

It originally ran for nine months at the Palais Royal, and it is not surprising that the work, composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, endeared itself to the king. The mythical story of a fearless hero whose arrogance is punished by the gods was none too subtly altered to show a hero who practises restraint and moderation to the foes he vanquishes – a reference to the Sun King's recent victory over the Dutch, the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor.

This is the first recording of this opera, presented as a book-CD in French, German and English. Bellérophon was recently showcased on Radio 3: Catherine Bott interviewed Christophe Rousset about the first modern day performance of this tragedie en lyrique, at the sumptuous Opera Royal at Versailles, and his discovery of missing pages of the score in a bookshop in Paris. Rousset also talked about the qualities that make Lully's opera stand out as a masterpiece.

Synopsis: The eponymous hero is Neptune’s son and is happily betrothed to the Lycian princess Philonoé. But the fiery Stenobée also desires Bellérophon and wants revenge due to his rejection of her. Her ally, the magician Amisodar, takes three monsters and creates a new one from them: the chimera. However, Bellérophon defeats the monster without too much difficulty. Thwarted, Stenobée kills herself out of disappointment and the Lycians acclaim Bellérophon whose dazzling strength and benevolence are intended to mirror similar attributes of Louis XIV’s.

Soprano Véronique Gens, one of the leading French singers of today, presents an imaginatively programmed sequel to her award-winning 2006 recital of tragic operatic heroines.

This second album of Tragédiennes features arias and ballet music from the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Baroque (Rameau) to the Romantic (Berlioz) by way of such important transitional figures as Gluck – a composer whose heroine figure prominently in Gens’ schedule in 2010, with Alceste in Aix-en-Provence, Iphigénie en Aulide in Brussels and Iphigénie en Tauride in Vienna – Cherubini, and lesser-known figures such as Piccini, Sacchini and Arriaga, the ‘Spanish Mozart’, who died at the age of just 19.

Reviewing the first Tragédiennes, Opera magazine described Gens as “a soprano moulded by the best performance traditions of the French Baroque rediscovery of recent decades, but also one capable — as she has proved live and on record — of compassing Mozart and Berlioz in her repertory. Gens’s liquid-toned soprano … [with its] evenness of vocal production and command of line and tone ... is the programme’s binding and focal point, and always balm to the ears.”

Opera went on to say that “[the programme] shows off Gens’s sophisticated mastery of recitative declamation and aria-shaping and her considerable command of the various necessary vocal styles and manners, while at the same time blending historical nous, musical novelty, vocal attraction and dramatic liveliness in a manner rarely encountered today. The project was obviously carefully conceived and prepared; hard indeed to imagine it without Rousset and his splendid orchestra, who interleave the vocal items with some well-chosen instrumental items from the works in question … it’s a CD worth acquiring by anyone with the smallest interest in the singer, the period and the genres on display.”

As Gramophone said of the first album: “Gens's great gift is in differentiating between the various tragic heroines and bringing total dramatic commitment to each. There's anger spat out at white heat but there's also quiet, brooding hysteria – all characterised to perfection. And in Christophe Rousset and his Talens Lyriques she has partners on a truly exalted plane of imagination, musicality and sheer theatrical flair.”

“It seems that, in the years around 1720, when people went to the opera to hear a castrato idol or an adored soprano, they would play cards, pay court to their neighbours and savour sorbets during the recitatives – even during the so-called arias of action, which they enjoyed less than the ornamented reprises of the showpiece arias. With this intractable and hedonistic audience in mind (so different from people like us, of course), thirteen star singers came together to concoct this festive piece, constructed and presented in three acts like a true dramma per musica, but with no explicit story and no concrete characters: in other words, an imaginary opera formed of passion and music.” Ivan A. Alexandre

This album marks the 250th anniversary of Handel’s death with creativity, erudition and maybe a touch of audacity. Far more than a compilation album, it selects individual numbers from 11 operas and two oratorios by Handel and reassembles them in a sequence that respects the potent formula elaborated in the composer’s 38 works for the operatic stage.

While there is no specific narrative, the listener will be drawn in by the dramatic logic of a balanced succession of numbers, including some ‘greatest hits.

This gripping recital of Handel ‘mad scenes’ is the first release from American mezzo Joyce DiDonato as an exclusive artist for Virgin and EMI Classics.

Over the past five years DiDonato has enjoyed an uninterrupted series of triumphs as an opera singer and recitalist in Europe and the USA. As the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s magazine Opera News wrote: ‘The buoyant progress of DiDonato’s career... has been one of the happiest opera events of the past decade’.

At the heart of her stage repertoire are Handel, Mozart and Rossini, though it also embraces Donizetti, Bellini, Massenet, Strauss and modern works, such as Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. Her signature role is probably Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia, which has taken her to New York’s Metropolitan, the Chicago Lyric, the Paris Opéra, London’s Royal Opera, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Houston, San Francisco, Bologna and Rossini’s birthplace, Pesaro. For her Met performances of Rosina in 2007, broadcast across the USA on HDTV, she received the prestigious Beverly Sills Award.

This recital of Handel arias with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques was recorded at concert performances in April 2008 at Brussels’ Théâtre de la Monnaie. Reporting on the concert, Forum Opéra said: “The mezzo takes this repertoire seriously and she has the means to deliver on her promises … as she demonstrated in dazzling, often intoxicating fashion. The flexibility of her instrument is amazing; and as if her true, vital coloratura and her exemplary legato were not enough in themselves, she brings all her resources to bear on sculpting the music, throwing out brilliant top notes, venturing powerful crescendos and raising the stakes in virtuosity. She both surprises and delights …”

A highlight of the programme is Dejanira’s climactic scene from Hercules. DiDonato’s stage performance as Hercules’ wife at London’s Barbican, with William Christie and Les Arts Florissants (in a production also seen in France and the US), earned her a nomination for a Laurence Olivier Award. The Guardian commented that: ‘Joyce DiDonato gives the performance of a lifetime, hurling out coloratura with the fury of a psychopath before descending into insanity’. In late 2007 she assumed two Handel title roles: Alcina and, at the Geneva Opera, Ariodante, prompting Le Figaro to praise the “moving perfection of her line and her singing, which conveys the emotions of the betrayed lover and does justice to all the colours in the music.”

“When given the treasured opportunity to record my first solo aria disc, I knew immediately that I wanted it to be dedicated to the works of Handel, for his music and his characters offer me the chance to take a profoundly emotional journey: nothing can remain on the surface – he constantly invites you to delve deeper. I thought it worthwhile to explore some of these rich, complicated, often lost characters to whom he devoted so much creative energy, to examine their psyches – searching for the reasons for their fury or despair – and to find their humanity. Fortunately, this is what Handel excelled at: eliciting the vulnerable, human side of these characters as they are often pushed into tragic circumstances. I'm constantly astonished to discover time and again how much beauty he finds in their (our?) suffering, how he gives melodic flight to such tragedy and such fire to their fury.” Joyce DiDonato