It’s Lully: 21-25 October

[vinteuil]

... really good to have more Lully. (Altho' Liszt wd've been good too... ).

Such a pity that so much of the first programme was taken up with performances by Hugo Reyne / Simphonie du Marais - so plodding and leaden : enuff to put anyone off Lully....

Happily I see that we are promised performances with Rousset, Herreweghe, Christie, Niquet, Minkowski for the rest of the week - much more rhythmically exciting and altogether livelier takes on this marvellous music...
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[doversoul1]

... really good to have more Lully. (Altho' Liszt wd've been good too... ).

Such a pity that so much of the first programme was taken up with performances by Hugo Reyne / Simphonie du Marais - so plodding and leaden : enuff to put anyone off Lully....

Happily I see that we are promised performances with Rousset, Herreweghe, Christie, Niquet, Minkowski for the rest of the week - much more rhythmically exciting and altogether livelier takes on this marvellous music...
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Very glad to hear this.

I am beginning to suspect that there is a conspiracy (by whomever it is) to get us to buy Radio Times (if that is where you are getting the information). There is absolutely NOTHING of any information online of the music that will be played. Infuriating.

[Serial_Apologist]

performances by Hugo Reyne / Simphonie du Marais - so plodding and leaden : enuff to put anyone off Lully....

I see. A lot of the instrumentation one heard today had a strangely tinny quality. And Lully wasn't rhythmically as interesting as Strauss suggested in his ersatz early baroque passages in "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" which actually sound more like Purcell, rhythmically and sonically - the rhythmic interest had begun to abandon western classical music by the mid 17th century and wouldn't return until the Diaghilev period. And, as with a lot of mid-17th C French music, there's not much counterpoint to offset the predictability of its omnipresent major/minor, minor/major cadences. For me it's counterpoint if anything that makes Baroque music interesting.

[vinteuil]

I see. A lot of the instrumentation one heard today had a strangely tinny quality. And Lully wasn't rhythmically as interesting as Strauss suggested in his ersatz early baroque passages in "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" which actually sound more like Purcell, rhythmically and sonically - the rhythmic interest had begun to abandon western classical music by the mid 17th century and wouldn't return until the Diaghilev period. And, as with a lot of mid-17th C French music, there's not much counterpoint to offset the predictability of its omnipresent major/minor, minor/major cadences. For me it's counterpoint if anything that makes Baroque music interesting.

... well thank you for that.

It took me a long time to appreciate the rhythmical interest of Lully : I came with the uninformed English idea that it was all four-square rum-ti-tum. It helps if you look at the scores. He can change time-signatures every few bars. Much of it is related to French rhetoric. Kenneth Gilbert used to say that the best way to appreciate the rhythmical intent of the harpsichord music of Couperin was a study of Bossuet's Oraisons Funèbres...

[doversoul1]

I expect these are old news to most readers of this thread but just in case anybody is interested in:

Atys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8dF8WSHngY

William Christie and Les Arts Florissants

Armide (I’m not too sure about this staging...)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzycBhEsCq4

William Christie and Les Arts Florissants

Phaëton, tragédie en musique (concert performance)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pekZPcODgdw

Christophe Rousset & Talens Lyriques

Bellérophon (concert performance)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wbujKEzv5Q

Catherine Bott samples Lully's opera "Bellérophon" with Christophe Rousset and his group Les Talens Lyriques who recently gave the first performance in modern times of this hugely successful tragedie en lyrique by Lully, in the sumptuous Opera Royal at Versailles, after Rousset's discovery of missing pages of the score in a bookshop in Paris. Rousset talks about his find, and about the qualities that make...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y225z