Lully: Ballet des amours déguisés (LWV 21) Plainte d'Armide: Ah, Rinaldo, e dove sei?

Nowadays, little introduction on record is needed for the dramatic output of Jean-Baptiste Lully: his style has become unquestionably associated with French music of the 17th century. But long before he became the all-conquering composer of tragedies en musique at the court of Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, Giovanni Battista Lulli had been a young Florentine employed as a page for the Duchess of Montpensier and detailed to provide her with conversational classes in Italian. In those early years in Paris, Lully also learnt his craft as a composer, encouraged by the efforts of France's First Minister, Cardinal Mazarin, also Italian-born, to encourage the spread of music from his native country to the French court: Francesco Cavalli was another composer attracted to Paris to demonstrate the mastery of Italians in opera. Lully's own initial compositions focused on music for ballets de cour and for these instrumental entrées were combined with vocal sections in Italian and his early treatment of recitative. Breaking off briefly from their ongoing grand survey of Handel's Italian Cantatas for Glossa, Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza draw us into the Italianate world of Paris of the 1650s and 1660s before leaving us at the gates of Lully's collaboration with Molière in Le bourgeois gentilhomme and his own entrance into the tragédie en musique.