NEO - French Baroque Music and New Compositions�brings together French Baroque music and modern compositions. The album includes works by Jean-Fery Rebel, Francois Couperin, and Marin Marais, along with new pieces by Calliope Tsoupaki, Willem Wander van Nieuwkerk, and Torben Klaes. Recorded in Burgundy, musicians Saskia Coolen, Patrick Ayrton, and Rainer Zipperling (viola da gamba) blend historical and modern styles.

ArcoDiva's newest release presents works for oboe performed by Martin Danek, a graduate of the prestigious Hanns Eisler University of Music in Berlin and winner of the 2019 Prague Spring International Competition. He says: "I've been living abroad for a long time, and playing in my own country is always something special", says Mr. Danek. "This is especially true in the case of Prague Spring, with it's festive atmosphere, which I remember from my childhood. The combinations of instruments and works on this program will be unusual, so it will be a unique experience for both the audience and the performers."

This latest MarchVivo release is a remastering of the concert given by Benjamin Alard at the Fundación Juan March on 1 February 2020 as part of a series entitled The Couperins at the harpsichord. The album focuses on the stylistic connections between different members of the most significant family in the history of the French Baroque: the Couperins. The harpsichord epitomized the intimacy and sophistication of salon music and, with the repertoire they composed for their instrument, the clavecinistes français helped forge a distinctive national style. This was renewed and enlivened by successive generations of the Couperin dynasty as they introduced innovative aspects of contemporary Italian style into their works, thereby creating an eloquent new idiom that was to have a lasting influence on the history of keyboard music.

This live recording immortalizes Christophe Rousset's performance at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid on January 8, 2025, a featured event in the Earning a Living concert series. Francois Couperin's keyboard compositions illuminate the role of royal patronage as the modus vivendi for musicians of the Early Modern period. Couperin's treatise, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, is here interwoven with a selection of his Pieces de clavecin, giving rise to a portrait gallery in music, each inspired by anonymous figures who inhabited the French court. This set of pieces de caractere, whose allusive and encoded meanings remain largely enigmatic today, is presented in groupings by tonality, each offering a window into the refined world of Baroque palace life and it's intricate web of connections.

Music for Harpsichord

When François Couperin published his Mass for the Convents in 1690, he had just turned 20, yet he had created the most exceptional collection of organ music to be written during the reign of Louis XIV. On the magnificent and historic Great Organ of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, over which Couperin presided from 1693 to 1730, the celebrated organist of Notre-Dame de Paris, Olivier Latry, performs a sumptuous version of this Organ Mass which, in a world premiere, is interlaced with captivating Chants sur le Livre, those sublime holy improvisations unique to French baroque music... for a moment of eternity.

For her new recording, entitled Or (light), cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has devised a two-part narrative, "a series of freeze frames, like incursions into time": first, Couperin's Les le�ons de t�n�bres or the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. Prophecies are created in the time before. Before destruction and tears: "We hear the prophet's song of lamentation, although the possibility that this might not come to pass still exists." Then comes "our time": "Vivaldi's dramatic power brings us face to face with the present. He says, 'It's here now.'" Sonia has chosen several excerpts from his operas and from two violin concertos. She transcribed most of the pieces in this programme for solo cello or two cellos, two voices that she plays herself. She also imagined bridges to other lights, those of Mahut's percussion and Marius Atherton's electric guitar and MS20 synthesiser.

L'APOTHEOSE DE LULLY / LECONS DE TENEBRES