Michel-Richard de Lalande
3 products
LES SOUPERS DU ROY
Lalande: Tenebrae / Dumestre, Lefilliatre, Le Poeme Harmonique
In 1680, Francois Chaperon, maître de musique of the Sainte-Chapelle, entrusted the setting of some verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to Michel Richard de Lalande and Jean-Fery Rebel, Lalande’s brother in law. The Lecons de Tenebres of 1680, now lost, probably provided material for the Tenebrae compositions that have come down to us. Although Lalande had written his Lecons and his Miserere for solo voice for the nuns of the convent of the Assumption, they were actually sung- like many of his works for female voices- by his daughters. The Lecons de Tenebres and Miserere must have therefore been composed some time before 1711, for that year Jeanne and Marie Anne de Lalande died in the smallpox epidemic. For this interpretation of the Miserere, the musicians have chosen the version presented in Brossard’s autograph manuscript of 1711, in which the alternate verses are sung by three voices in faux-bourdon, a practice that was still in vogue at that time in France. Fragmentary notation for a treble instrument is found throughout this manuscript version, thus attesting the practice, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of improvising the countermelody at sight.
Lalande: Les Fontaines de Versailles / Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble
Michel-Richard Delalande is regarded as one of the great composers of the French Baroque, and so it is not surprising that our prizewinning Boston Early Music Ensemble has now turned to him. Along with his many sacred works, Delalande also wrote for the court occasions that required secular music. Les Fontaines de Versailles, the work occupying a central position on this release, above all contributed to Delalande’s increasing popularity. It was performed on 5 April 1683, some weeks before Delalande was appointed to the coveted post of “Sous-maître de Chapelle.” After the court had settled in Versailles with King Louis XIV in 1682, its musical microcosm also experienced a renewal. Les Fontaines de Versailles numbered among Delalande’s efforts to produce an oeuvre perfectly tailored for Versailles, both in its form as well as in its poetic content, thereby demonstrating his skill as a composer of »French music« and displaying it in a proper light for the king. It is with refined sophistication that Les Fontaines de Versailles evokes the special relationship between the king and his gardens. Delalande beyond doubt occupied the first place among Louis XIV’s favorites: in 1689 the king named the thirty-one-year-old his “Surintendant de la Musique de la Chambre,” a post that before only Jean-Baptiste Lully and then one of his sons had held.
