Le Concert Spirituel / Hervé Niquet LULLY Armide

ARMIDE

Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset ANTONIO SALIERI Tarare

After Les Danaïdes and Les Horaces, Les Talens Lyriques concludes the group’s cycle of Antonio Salieri’s French operas with the world premiere recording of Tarare.  Often unfairly overshadowed by his brilliant contemporary Mozart, Salieri here composed a genuine masterpiece on the only libretto ever written by Beaumarchais.

Salieri has a taste for exoticism and, like Mozart in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he transports us into a fantasy Orient seen through the eyes of the pre-revolutionary philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The indefatigable Christophe Rousset, unswerving in his efforts to revive scores that are rarely performed or have mysteriously languished in the shadows, directs a five- star cast: the Captain of the Guard Tarare (Cyrille Dubois) enters the palace of the Sultan Atar (Jean-Sébastien Bou) in order to rescue his beloved, the slave Astasie (Karine Deshayes). Behind the love triangle, one senses Beaumarchais’s indictment of authority in his depiction (in 1787!) of the people’s revolt against the Sultan’s tyrannical power - so much so that it is astonishing that the plot escaped the royal censor’s net.

The music follows the story’s misunderstandings, plot twists and spectacular scenes to produce an opera that prefigures Romanticism, exhilaratingly performed by Les Talens Lyriques and Les Chantres of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. A release that should restore Salieri’s prestige once and for all.

Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset ANTONIO SALIERI Les Horaces

Les Talens Lyriques are a major french classical music ensemble, recognized on the international scale for both its musicological work and editorial choices. Created twenty years ago by french harpsichordist and conductor Christophe Rousset. The ensemble has a large lyrical and instrumental repertoire ranging from Baroque to Early Romanticism.

Following the release of Les Danaïdes in 2015, Les Talens Lyriques present the first world recording of Antonio Salieri’s Les Horaces, which they recreated at Versailles in 2016. To bring this score back to life, Christophe Rousset gathered a vocal cast in which tenor Cyrille Dubois, Judith van Wanroij, Julien Dran or Jean-Sebastien Bou embody the fate of the characters inspired by the fratricidal struggle of Horatius and Curiatius in Ancient Rome, dramatically revived by an already romantic Salieri in his musical boldness. Fights, vows and great crowd scenes, the tears of heroine Camilla, the Curiatius’ dilemma, or the implacable determination of old Horatius offer intense and original drama.