What do Couperin, Forqueray, Marais and Rameau reveal about one another when they portray each other in music? With “Carré d’As”, Les Timbres brings together self-portraits, tributes and musical evocations, revealing four distinct personalities behind four of the great names of French Baroque music.
How should Handel’s solo sonatas be brought to life when their publishing history, their sources and, at times, even their intended instrumentation remain fluid? Released in MDG’s Preziosa series, this double album by the Ganassi Consort with Anne Röhrig does not opt for uniformity: it entrusts the corpus to a whole range of period instruments, in order to recover, as closely as possible to historical practice, the diversity of a chamber Handel who is by turns lyrical, dance-like, theatrical and inventive.
For her first recital on Harmonia mundi, Gabrielle Rubio returns to the composers who first established the French transverse flute as an instrument of distinction. From Michel de La Barre to Michel Blavet, via Hotteterre, Philidor, Boismortier and Couperin, the young flautist traces a journey through dances, reveries and chiaroscuro, from the hushed intimacy of the King’s Chamber to the salons of the eighteenth century.
Giovanni Acciai and Nova Ars Cantandi bring Antonio Domenico Nola’s “Motetti pastorali per la solennità del Santo Natale” back into the light: an expansive Neapolitan fresco for four voices and basso continuo that had remained in obscurity for almost four centuries. Combining sacred narrative, expressive polyphony and echoes of popular Christmas traditions, this recording reveals a still little-known figure in Neapolitan music at the turn of the eighteenth century.
With “Clavecins concertants”, Olivier Fortin and Emmanuel Frankenberg recreate an entire world of French orchestral theatre on two harpsichords, from Lully to Rameau via Marais, d’Anglebert, Chambonnières, Lebègue and Forqueray. Overtures, chaconnes, dance airs and celebrated pieces acquire a new breadth in this setting: the two instruments do more than simply converse, together they reimagine the colours, textures and energy of a Baroque orchestra.
With this new release, Benjamin Alard adds two freshly authenticated works to his ambitious complete recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music. Centred on two chaconnes recently restored to the Cantor, the French keyboard player continues his exploration of an instrumental world in which dance, variation and contrapuntal architecture come together in the same expressive concentration.
With this first solo recording, harpsichordist Dmytro Kokoshynskyy offers far more than a journey through the golden age of the English virginalists. Centred on Tallis, Byrd, Bull, Gibbons and Dowland, among others, he builds an intimate meditation on music as refuge, remedy and mirror of troubled times, extended into our own day by KHORA by the composer Maxim Shalygin.
With this new album, the ensemble Les Lunaisiens, led by Arnaud Marzorati, reaffirms its mission: to bring the ancestral heritage of French chanson back into the spotlight. By presenting a history of France through its songs, the ensemble brings to light contrasting tales from different eras—sometimes dramatic, sometimes satirical—which bear witness to the richness and complexity of the popular vocal heritage.
Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, the child prodigy of Louis XIV’s court, is familiar enough; Anna Bon and Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, musicians connected with the Bayreuth milieu and with the flute, an instrument dear to Frederick II, are heard less often. With Compositrices, the flautist Marta Gawlas brings these three figures together in a single gesture: to reveal, without any heavy-handed manifesto, the refinement of their writing and the inventiveness of women composers still too rarely represented on disc. A luminous way into a repertoire waiting to be rediscovered.
We may think we know Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord; here, Atsushi Sakai and Christophe Rousset restore them to their share of mystery. Works that are hard to place, whether a genuine cycle or a gathering of independent pieces, they become here a space of close dialogue between viol and harpsichord, between contrapuntal rigour, inner song and meditation.
Orlando furioso never ceased to exert its pull on the Baroque imagination. With “Furioso”, Xavier Sabata, Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu and Franck-Emmanuel Comte offer a concentrated journey through it, in which Ariosto’s hero appears by turns as knight, lost lover, figure of fury and wavering soul. An album built like an inner theatre.
We all know “Iphigenia in Tauris” by Gluck; here is the rarer setting by Tommaso Traetta, brought to disc by Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques. Recorded in Innsbruck, this release brings to light a different musical reading of the myth, poised between the legacy of opera seria and emerging dramatic priorities, and carried by a committed vocal cast. A discovery.
