It was on July 18, 1668 that Moliere successfully performed George Dandin ou le mari confundu, a play mixed with a sung pastoral, for “Le Grand Divertissement Royal de Versailles” offered by Louis XIV to his Court, as a celebration of the Peace of Aachen. This amusing story of a rich peasant who purchases a young noble girl includes interludes set to the splendid music of Lully. The same year sees the promising meeting between Lully and Quinault: together they write for King La Grotte de Versailles, in which Louis is glorified, and dances in person the role of a nymph. These two works, symbolic of the creative vigor of the early days of Versailles, and of the artistic appetite of a thirty-year-old Sovereign, are brought back to life thanks to Gaetan Jarry and Marguerite Louise, with incomparable taste: tambourines, flutes and musettes are part of the festivities and the trumpets proclaim the glory of Louis. Here we have a scintillating echo of the sumptuous festivities given at Versailles by Louis XIV!

The Magnificat, written to celebrate Mary’s joy after the Annunciation, and the oldest Christmas Cantata of Bach (Weimar, 1713), overwhelming fresco of a Nativity, foundation of the world. With these masterful works, Johann-Sebastien Bach opens up for us the gates of what is sacred as well as to our own relationship with spirituality. These pieces, amongst the most beautiful ever composed, are no doubt the best way possible to open the Christmas period. Led here by the very young but nonetheless inspired Valentin Tournet who conducts his ensemble La Chapelle Harmonique. Valentin Tournet, founder and musical director of La Chapelle Harmonique, began the group in 2017. The ensemble includes a choir and a period instrument orchestra. His repertoire, principally centered on Bach, goes from the polyphony of the Renaissance to the baroque of the Age of Enlightenment.

Louis Dieudonn� de Bourbon was crowned Louis XIV King of France on the 7th of June 1654 in Reims Cathedral. For this most important moment in the life of the Monarch, the ceremonial was as impressive as a sacred opera. Reims Cathedral, dressed in the finest pomp and splendor, played host to the greats of the Kingdom of France and the Princes of Europe. Unearthed through meticulous research, the music played during this Coronation before God accompanies the ceremony along with the pomp of the decorations and the sung texts, the different musical ensembles and the great variety of instruments used, brought back to life thanks to a considerable number of performers, arranged according to their location in the sacred space. As this splendid music is finally heard again, S�bastien Dauc�, his ensemble Correspondances and Les Pages du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles offer us a Coronation of Louis XIV in music, in the setting of the Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles: a real immersion in one of the most memorable ceremonies in the history of France.

Make the most of the beauty of the Chateau de Versailles gardens, the groves are exceptionally open to the public, the fountains' water turned on and accompanied by music that in bygone days would bring them to life on the occasion of the Musical Fountains Shows. The Grandes Eaux de Versailles- Music of the Royal Festivities is a selection of works from the new label "Ch�teau de Versailles Spectacles." Entirely recorded in the emblematic places of the Chateau, such as the Royal Opera, the Royal Chapel, La Cour de Marbre or the Little Queen's Theater (Trianon), you will find compositions interpreted by the best and most promising artists. The works featured here include pieces by Lully, Delalande, Charpentier, Campra, Haendel, Cavalli, Biber, and Philidor.

It was whilst on the verge of loving despair that Hector Berlioz wrote this Symphonie Fantastique, �pisode de la vie d'un artiste (episode from the life of an artist) where he portrays the obsession of this impossible love and the torture it inflicts upon the young man who has almost gone mad. It was first performed in December 1830 and immediately became the emblem of the musical avant-garde, making use of an unheard of soundscape which drove the audience into a frenzy which had never before been known for an orchestral work in France. Revived here by the great Sir John Eliot Gardiner, the concert is filled with symbolic works by the composer with the spendid overture from the Corsaire, and the cantata, La Mort de Cl�op�tre. And finally, two mythical extracts from the great work by Berlioz, his opera, Les Troyens.

Perhaps Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Devin du Village has been waiting just for you for two centuries at the Theatre de la Reine at the Petit Trianon. On September 19, 1780, Marie-Antoinette was on stage, in costume, and was acting with her troop of aristocrats in front of a public of close friends. That evening, she was singing the role of Colette, the heroine of this one act opera composed in 1753 by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most celebrated work of its time. That exceptional evening, a veritable fantasy of the Queen’s who imagined that she was a shepherdess, has been resuscitated under the direction of Sebastien d’Herin in a costumed reconstitution, staged in the original historic sets. A bonus film of the complete performance accompanies this recording.

Two rival yet similar works, an illustration of a "Quarrel of the Te Deums", a true war of mottled violin scores, a frivolous echo of Louis XV's final victories. It is also the rediscovery of two of the most talented composers amongst Rameau's contemporaries, Fran�ois Colin de Blamont and Esprit Joseph Antoine Blanchard. Daniel Cuiller appropriates this music with the voracity which had led him to revive a previous Te Deum, on that occasion by Henri Madin, and which was covered with praise. Add to this the brilliant singers of the Marguerite Louise choir which is directed by Ga�tan Jarry and the virtuoso musicians of Stradivaria, Daniel replied with enthusiasm to this "commission" for the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

In 1607, Claudio Monteverdi premiered his Orfeo for the Carnival opening in the Court Theatre of Duke Vincenzo I of Gonzaga in Mantua. For the first time in the history of music, real characters are brought to life with deeply moving human feelings: with this exceptional dramatic power, modern opera is born. Stephane Fuget, a great specialist in this repertoire and it's historical instrumentalisation, after Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, has brought together some of the finest vocal and instrumental virtuosos for this new Orfeo: he has entrusted the eponymous role to the splendid and sensitive Julian Pregardien, to sing all the magnificence of the first true hero in the history of opera.

No one has surpassed Marais: only one has equalled him, and that is the famous Forqueray: with these words, in 1752, a contemporary praised one of the last great virtuosos of the viola da gamba. Known for his formidably difficult and technical musical style, Forqueray's world is nonetheless immensely rich: through the works of the father Antoine, his son Jean-Baptiste and his nephew Nicolas-Gilles, an august lineage emerges whose grace and genius never ceased to inspire. At times proud, even bellicose, at other times deeply tender, the viol pieces by this Forqueray family plunge us into a flight of expressions of passions whose vivacity is equalled only by their intensity. Myriam Rignol, as a distant granddaughter, accompanied by her exquisite Timbres, delivers in this complete work a powerful homage to these 18th-century chamber music icons who, in their image, could never be anything other than virtuoso.

Armide was Lully and Quinault's last tragedie lyrique: undoubtedly Quinault's finest dramatic achievement, and the culmination of the tragedie en musique conceived by Lully, who died the year after it's creation. Never has language appeared so beautiful and tragic in Lully's music, and the drama of this Christian knight falling in love with the sorceress who refuses to kill him was so deeply felt that it remained on stage for a century! Here, Vincent Dumestre passionately conducts Lully's last masterpiece, whose eponymous character, played by the immense Stephanie D'Oustrac, never ceases to bewitch us.

Les Fetes grecques et romaines, Colin de Blamont's first opera, was a resounding success from the moment it premiered in 1723. A synthesis between the nobility of the tragedie lyrique created by Lully and the more playful tone, with it's choreographed divertissements, of the opera-ballet created by Campra, it's libretto brings to life the best-known festivals of ancient History. The eloquent Alcibiades distinguishes himself at the Olympic Games, Mark Antony and Cleopatra celebrate the intoxicating Bacchanalia, and the poet Tibullus passionately courts his beloved Delia at the Saturnalia... Valentin Tournet helps us rediscover this masterpiece of the Age of Enlightenment, which for far too long has been overshadowed by it's famous contemporaries.

Born in 1749, Cimarosa was one of Europe's leading composers at the end of the 18th century. It was during his most productive period that he produced his Olimpiade, a grand opera seria transformed into a sumptuous bel canto drama. In it, Cimarosa brings heroism to the athletes competing in the Games in Olympia, the winner of which will marry Princess Aristea: the seemingly inextricable plot allows the composer to write some of the most extraordinary arias based on Metastasio's libretto. Christophe Rousset, champion of the Italian repertoire of the end of the 18th century, leads a dazzling cast in this hurricane of bel canto!

Le Carnaval du Parnasse, Mondonville's heroic ballet, was a dazzling triumph at its premiere in 1749, eclipsing Rameau's Zoroastre, which premiered the same year. Dedicated to the Marquise de Pompadour, muse of the arts and the omnipotent favorite of the King, this whimsical carnival is nothing short of a delicious marivaudage: on Mount Parnassus, Apollo and his Muses indulge in feasts of the senses and entertainments of the heart… Mondonville displays prodigious virtuosity throughout, depicting unheard-of orchestral colors and imagining unbridled dances and vast ceremonial choruses comparable to those in his great motets. Alexis Kossenko and his ensemble Les Ambassadeurs ~ La Grande Écurie, joined by the eminent vocal power of the Chœur de Chambre de Namur, have made an exceptional rediscovery of this masterful reincarnation of the splendors of the Court of Louis XV, then at its apogee.

At the end of the world, on the mythical island of Ogygia, while Neptune unleashes a storm, the inconsolable Calypso tries to seduce a handsome young castaway named Telemachus… Will Ulysses' son respond to the nymph's dangerous charms? Will he manage, as a humble mortal in the scheme of the gods, to escape the island where his father was once a prisoner ? A quintessential Homeric epic, Télémaque & Calypso is a flamboyant tribute to Destouches' own dramatic efficiency, and his particular attention to "lively speech" and natural declamation. After Sémiramis, Sylvain Sartre continues his brilliant journey through the masterpieces of the adventurous composer and musketeer, which are now finaly revealed.

In 1731, at the height of his London fame, Handel created his 28th opera seria: a vocal pyrotechnic about the rivalry, in love and war, between Alexander the Great and the Indian King Porus. Rage and spite, love and glory drive the extraordinary arias that Handel entrusted to two of his favourite singers: the castrato star Senesino for the title role, and the soprano Anna Maria Strada del Pò as the treacherous Cleofide. It was a sign of the work's success and the prestige of its cast. Poro was performed twenty times in 1731, a virtually exceptional figure. The young tenor Marco Angioloni - singing the role of Alexander - brings this opera back to life with his Ensemble Il Groviglio, and a magnificent cast that would have delighted Handel!