André Cardinal Destouches (1672-1749) is virtually unknown today, but he was the preeminent composer of French opera in the half century between the end of Lully's career and the beginning of Rameau's. On the basis of this fine recording of Callirhoé, considered one of his most important operas, the neglect is difficult to understand. Its strength ...
Hervé Niquet, the conductor who has recorded so many of the grand motets of the Grand Siècle -- those choral-orchestral works by Lully, Rameau, Campra, and Charpentier that stand with the cantatas of Bach and the anthems of Handel as the great sacred works of the Baroque -- turns here to three works by Henry Desmarets that were, in their time, ...
Missa Assumpta est Maria, the last of Charpentier's many mass settings, written about 1700, is considered his greatest work in the genre, and this splendid recording by Hervé Niquet supports that assessment. The mass offers further evidence that Charpentier, whose music was virtually unknown except to scholars until the late twentieth century, ...
The revival of Prosperpine, Lully's 1680 collaboration with his longtime librettist Philippe Quinault, by Hervé Niquet and his ensemble Le Concert Spirituel, reveals that while the opera may not have the most compelling dramatic impact, it has an abundance of expressive, elegant, richly varied music, written with inspiration that never flags over ...
Quite a few performances of Handel's Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks have been done on historical instruments, but this one by French conductor Hervé Niquet and his ensemble Le Concert Spirituel confidently bills itself as the "first historical version," with the claim justified by reference to "original instrumentation and tuning." ...
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