This is Atys, the King's Opera, Lully’s masterpiece, premièred in 1676 before the court. A legendary work in the rediscovery of Grand-Siècle operas, Atys is a paragon of emerging lyric art: it places love at the centre of the plot, and its hero – for the first time in Lully's work – dies on stage, provoking a sumptuous lamentation that could wring tears from the most hardened heart. Lully’s incredible music magnifies Philippe Quinault’s splendid tragic text, creating their first joint masterpiece, an Atys adored by the Sun King. Christophe Rousset offers his vision of a piece that has fascinated him for the past three decades, lending it the sensual colour imbued by the Reinoud Van Mechelen's performance, a miraculous Atys…

Acis et Galatée is acknowledged as one of Lully’s finest masterpieces. This recording from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is conducted by the early music specialist Federico Maria Sardelli, and features tenor Jean-François Lombard and soprano Elena Harsányi in the principal roles. Also available on Dynamic Blu-ray (57971) and DVD (37971).

Here; four exceptional Grands Motets composed by Lully to the greatest glory of Louis XIV have been brought together: Plaude Laetare Gallia was performed in 1668 as a jubilant celebration of the birth of his first son; the Grand Dauphin; Benedictus is a piece of extraordinary architecture that transcends the sacred drama; Notus in Judea Deus; composed in 1685 shortly before Lully’s death; is a true victory song celebrating the glory of God; finally; Domine Salvum fac Regem; an energetic “God save the King”; was systematically sung in honour of the sovereign. The sublime Magnificat by Henry Du Mont; who was in charge of the Music of the King's Chapel until 1683; adds yet more splendour. Stéphane Fuget has brought together the best performers; a veritable “army of generals” with a vast choir composed of exceptional singers; to bring these legendary pieces back to life amid the magnificence of Versailles.

Having been granted unprecedented authority by Louis XIV, the Sun King, no one could stage operas in France without Jean-Baptiste Lully’s permission. By 1686, however, Lully’s authority was waning and his long-standing librettist deserted him to write sacred works. Despite these setbacks, Lully wrote Acis et Galatée, a pastorale héroïque, and one of his final masterpieces. (Dynamic)

Venus, irritated by the young mortal Psyché whose beauty radiates all across the world, dispatches Cupid to impose a thousand trials upon her, which the young victim triumphs over to the point of becoming immortal. In this mythological fable, which is his sixth tragédie lyrique (1678), Lully shows off his immense talent and takes revenge on Molière, for whom he had written the music of a monumental Psyché in 1671, and which had been the cause of their falling out. A connoisseur of Lully, Christophe Rousset conducts a sumptuous cast that gives his Psyché all the luster of the great French operas!

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Also available on standard DVD

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys, a tragédie en musique, became known as the ‘king’s opera’ due to Louis XIV’s fondness for it. The work stands as a testament to the Sun King’s courtly refinement, as well as his moves to make France the center of European artistic culture. The opera’s themes of romantic dilemmas and ultimate tragedy, set amidst the poetic atmosphere of Ovid’s classical mythology, create the perfect vehicle for a narrative filled with dramatic intensity combined with a myriad of moving and expressive arias and duets. William Christie conducts this acclaimed production – hailed by The New York Times as being ‘as satisfying it is bold’.

REVIEW:

The role of Atys is physically as well as vocally taxing, but is here superbly realised by the German tenor, Bernard Richter, while the French soprano, Emmanuelle De Negri, is an excellent Sangaride, with the creamy voice of the mezzo, Stephanie D’Oustrac, as Cybele completing the love triangle. The cast list is large, and with the Compagnie Fetes Galantes providing the dancers, the stage is at times totally filled. The reviews at the time of filimg (2011) were suitably euphoric regarding the casting, and equally of the presence of the period instrument orchestra, Les Arts Florrissants, with the idiomatic conducting of William Christie. The filming itself is immaculate in its ideal mix of full stage and close-up images, while the sound quality is gorgeous.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Also available on Blu-ray

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys, a tragédie en musique, became known as the ‘king’s opera’ due to Louis XIV’s fondness for it. The work stands as a testament to the Sun King’s courtly refinement, as well as his moves to make France the center of European artistic culture. The opera’s themes of romantic dilemmas and ultimate tragedy, set amidst the poetic atmosphere of Ovid’s classical mythology, create the perfect vehicle for a narrative filled with dramatic intensity combined with a myriad of moving and expressive arias and duets. William Christie conducts this acclaimed production – hailed by The New York Times as being ‘as satisfying as it is bold’.

REVIEW:

The role of Atys is physically as well as vocally taxing, but is here superbly realised by the German tenor, Bernard Richter, while the French soprano, Emmanuelle De Negri, is an excellent Sangaride, with the creamy voice of the mezzo, Stephanie D’Oustrac, as Cybele completing the love triangle. The cast list is large, and with the Compagnie Fetes Galantes providing the dancers, the stage is at times totally filled. The reviews at the time of filimg (2011) were suitably euphoric regarding the casting, and equally of the presence of the period instrument orchestra, Les Arts Florrissants, with the idiomatic conducting of William Christie. The filming itself is immaculate in its ideal mix of full stage and close-up images, while the sound quality is gorgeous.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

An ancient hero, a dragon, a young goddess: love and glory are at the heart of Lully's first opera, first performed in front of Louis XIV. As in his previous works - divertissements, ballets de cour and comédies- ballets - Lully makes the voices and the orchestra sparkle, multiplying the pieces which stand out and that were appealing to the court. But with the help of the librettist Philippe Quinault, he introduced the dramatic force of French classical tragédie in an exclusively musical work: and here the audience was bewitched by the mythical love stories so sumptuously portrayed. The first tragic heroes, the first great love duets, the first tears from the audience: the tragédie-lyrique, this opera in the French manner, was born, and thanks to it, until his death in 1687, Lully would never cease to delight. Vincent Dumestre brilliantly resuscitates this seminal work, thus celebrating with dignity the three hundred and fifty years of the Académie royale de musique!

A musician of genius, Jean-Baptiste Lully put all his musical science at the service of intense oratorical emotion in the Grands Motets. These vast religious compositions, with their powerful dramatic character, were representative of the splendor deployed at the court of Louis XIV. The Dies Irae and the De Profundis, imbued with great solemnity, were both given at the royal funeral of Louis XIV's wife, Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, in 1683 in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. This extraordinary Funerial ostentation was magnified by Lully's works, making Madame de Sevigne remark that at their performance that "all eyes were welled up with tears". Stephane Fuget and Les epopees - a veritable army of generals - deliver a grandiose, shimmering, theatrical and oratorical version of this music, draping it in an abundance of brilliant glittering ornaments, like the sun invigorating the stained-glass windows, mirrors and gilding of Versailles, to the point of eternity.

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!

Armide, premiered in 1686, was the last joint work of Lully and the poet Philippe Quinault. It immediately became a pillar of the Opéra’s repertory, which it finally left only in 1766, when it was removed to make room for a new wave of composers, Philidor, Grétry, Gossec and soon Gluck. A few attempts to restore former tastes still allowed audiences to hear such works as Persée, revived in 1770 (and recorded in that version by Hervé Niquet, ALPHA967). But these operas were profoundly modified in order to increase the role of the orchestra and tailor the vocal numbers to the singers of the day. This was the context for the fascinating and unpublished version of Armide that has lain dormant in the Bibliothèque Nationale for more than two centuries. The revisions to the original are by Louis-Joseph Francœur, nephew of the celebrated François Francœur, one of Louis XV’s court musicians. This recording of the 1778 version of Armide, made at the Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, is not merely the first modern performance but the work’s world premiere, since none of its music was ever actually played at the time. It enables us to grasp the evolution of the ideas and practices of French music over a whole century.

Elena Sartori’s aim with this new recording is to reinterpret a pair of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s grand motets through the prism of his Italian heritage. As Sartori notes in her booklet essay, the magnificent Te Deum shares little of musical style or text-setting in common with Lully’s operas. The ornamentation and stylised, asymmetric rhythms that are woven through the texture of his dramatic works and those of his successors such as Rameau are notable by their absence; she finds, instead, ‘a deep-rooted, maternal sense of melody, and an enduring, even unwitting memory of Latinate language that leads the work away from factional claims (of national style).’ Anyone who follows Lully’s music and the French Baroque will want to investigate this new recording, which was made in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna: a Byzantineera building with its own complex history which lends an imposing sense of space to the interpretations.