Love after the Storm

French Cantatas - The Theatre of the Salon

An exciting new collaboration with director ​​​​​Guido Martin-Brandis and three outstanding singers - Hilary Cronin, Emily Gray and Samuel Boden.

The beautiful cantata repertoire being performed in French salons at the beginning of the 18th century provided a training ground for composers to try out dramatic scenes before making full scale operas for the public opera houses. Rameau composed several cantatas before writing his first opera and other composers we hardly hear or know of today like Montéclair, Lefebvre, Courbois, Clérambault produced volumes of them.They were inspired by the flow of new music and drama from Italy and the rediscovery and obsession with the Ancients and the art of gesture and rhetoric. These pieces contains some of the most exquisite, dramatic and sensual music of the early French baroque. Delving ever deeper into this fascinating time of drama, gesture and emotion in french music of the early 18th century Guido Martin Brandis will bring these cantatas to life with his dramatisation of the text and simple staging.
this is continuing the fruitful creative collaboration that brought you the 2021 show 'Rameau's Roots and Mouret's Madness' and the 'Castor et Pollux' project .
Full press review here
A scene from Le Berger Fidèle by Rameau. The shepherd's lover, Amarillis, is to be sacrificed to the goddess Diane. However his love proves so faithful that she is reprieved and 'Amour' wins! (Happy ending)
From our performance at Heath Street Church in Hampstead on November 11 2023

our singers in the press.....

… Samuel Boden, possessor of one of the most versatile tenor voices in the world… vocally and physically he has the chameleon ability to charm the birds off the trees. - iNews, 31 May 2024 Hilary Cronin - "a big voice of great controlled emotion and poise…This is a star voice, no mistake.” - Opera Now 2023“…the heart-soaring soprano of Hilary Cronin…” iNews 2023
Emily Gray - "Michel Pignolet de Montéclair’s Morte di Lucretia was sung with scary intensity by Emily Gray, a versatile, powerful mezzo who is magnetic on stage and should be way better known. The piece is lovely, if pretty standard, but this performance (and that of Hilary Cronin as a supporting angel) took it to another place." Opera Now 2024.
Programme

​Ouverture - Leclair
La Morte di Lucretia - Montéclair
Orphée: Laissez-vous toucher par mes pleurs - Clérambault
Musette for Viola da Gamba - Marin Marais
Les Regrets: Venez chère Ombre - Louis Antoine Lefebvre
A Storm - Rameau
*********
Entrée de Polimnie from Les Boreades - Rameau
Sans freyer dans ce bois - Charpentier
Le Berger Fidèle - Rameau
Tambourins and tunes by Rameau, Mouret, Montéclair,
Les Génies: Final chorus - Mademoiselle Duval

SHOWREEL

Photos by Bonnie Britain

Guido's 'director's notes' from the programme


​​​​​​​​Sarah and I had a wonderful time at the beginning of this year, looking through all sorts of forgotten music by little known French composers writing between 1700s and 1730s, in the generation between Lully and Rameau. Rameau, the summation and crowning glory of the French Baroque, we knew of course and loved already, but names like Courbois, Lefebvre, Montéclair, Clerambault, and Duval were either largely unknown to us, or entirely new. We discovered that many of them had written chamber cantatas intended for salon performance, a genre that is the introvert cousin of the grand operas that were happening on the great stages of Paris and Versailles. Virtually all of them are written for a solo voice, and would not originally have been acted out - the aim was more a sort of musical storytelling, often with a classical subject and an improving moral messages about virtue or love. For Rameau, his early works in this genre (such as Le Berger Fidele of 1728) were an innovative testing ground for the revolutionary operas that were still to come from him.

These pieces were a thrilling discovery for us, not just for the ravishing musical beauty and vitality contained within these gems of compression, but also for their potent dramatic intensity. I realised that by splitting the solo vocal parts up between a small cast of singers, the theatricality, psychological acuity, and humour of these wonderful works could be released in an exciting new way. Although this is an all French program, you’ll notice that Montéclair’s superb cantata, La Morte di Lucretia, is actually sung in Italian. There was great debate in French musical circles throughout the 18th century about the value of Italian influence on French music, though usually this was a stylistic debate about the place of melody in the hierarchy of musical concerns and the treatment of words in word setting. It is rarer to get an actual example of a French composer setting an Italian text, and here Montéclair beautifully marries the French style to certain tricks he learned from the Italians, to devastating effect. Framing the cantatas are overtures, dances, folk tunes, and orchestral storms from some of our favourite operas by Rameau and his contemporaries. In fact, this concert shows the whole span of Rameau’s composing life. Included are two excerpts from Rameau’s Les Boréades, his last opera. Composed in 1763 in the last year of his life, it shows the octogenarian’s powers of invention not just undimmed, but more vital than ever. We have made chamber arrangements of these orchestral pieces to juxtapose this final dramatic flowering of Rameau’s oeuvre with his Salon cantatas, the nursery of his writing for the dramatic stage. Several of the works on this program have never been played in the UK before, and certainly none of them staged, so we hope you enjoy these tasty offerings!