All Hail The Sun King Music inspired by the court at Versailles By Thomas Gerber & Barthold Kuijken Jean-Baptiste Lully left his native Italy (Tuscany, to be exact) at age 13 to serve as an Italian tutor to Louis XIV’s cousin, the “Grande Mademoiselle” Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans. Few composers experience such a meteoric rise as did Lully, who would by age 28 be elevated to the post of surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi, accountable only to Louis XIV himself. Over the next 26 years he reigned as the most powerful musician in France, earning a place in history as well as numerous enemies in an environment where status and privilege were paramount. Although trained as a violinist and celebrated as a dancer, Lully’s historical importance lies in his creation of music for the Parisian stage, including ballet, and especially opera, which had just been invented a few decades earlier in Italy. The character Armide is an enchantress who captures knights returning from the Crusades, rendering them helpless prisoners for her own amusement. The hero Renaud excites both her desire, because he’s so handsome and heroic, and her anger, because he manages to set all her other prisoners free, and therein lies Armide’s dilemma. Two movements from Armide (1686) are included here: the curtainraiser, the Ouverture, as well as a grand dance called a passacaille, or set of variations over a recurring bass line, which itself is subject to variation. Georg Philipp Telemann, though much less well known today than his contemporary J. S. Bach, reigned as the most famous composer in Germany during the first half of the 18th century. He is also perhaps the most prolific composer ever, due to both his unusually long career (he died at 86 and was productive into very old age) and his indefatigable energy. Although he studied in Leipzig and worked early in life in Sorau, Eisenach. and Frankfurt, he is most closely associated with the great North German city state of Hamburg, a commercial and arts hub which boasted Germany’s first opera house. Telemann composed many operas, although few see the light of day today, and much music for the Lutheran Church. He held a post much like Bach held in Leipzig, that is to say, in 1721, at age 40, he became Kantor of the Johanneum and music director of Hamburg’s five main churches. His production of instrumental music, whether for orchestra, chamber ensemble, or solo instrument, is jawdroppingly immense. Amongst his many Ouvertures, or suites, the Ouverture in E minor is a relatively early work thought to have been composed before 1716, which would place Telemann in his Eisenach/Frankfurt period. The work opens with a French-style ouverture, a style credited to Lully, which contrasts a weighty cut-time grave section with a sprightly section in triple time. The best known French overture is to Handel’s oratorio Messiah. Two of the subsequent movements, the Menuet and the Hornpipe, are stylized dance movements often found in suites, while Les Cyclopes refers to the one-eyed monster encountered by Odysseus and his men, and “Galimatias” means nonsensical things, or gibberish. Jean-Marie Leclair was a product of the middle class, like Telemann, whose university trained family members often joined the clergy, and Lully, whose father and cousins were millers. However, Leclair’s family combined its middle class identity (they were lacemakers) with music, as many of Leclair’s relatives were violinists as well. Leclair’s flair for violin playing was accompanied by a gift for dancing, a blend of traits he shared with Lully, as well as with many a violinist of long ago, as they could teach dancing and play the dance music simultaneously. Leclair was known for his beautiful tone and, according to one writer, playing “like an angel.” He was successful in Paris at a time (the 1720s, 30s, and 40s) when public concerts were coming into vogue, and he was well known at court, too, being appointed by Louis XV as ordinaire de la musique du roi in 1733. At age 67 his life was abruptly cut short: returning home late on the evening of October 22, 1764, he was murdered as he entered his house, a crime which remains a mystery to this day. Although he composed an opera (Scylla et Claucus) and some ballet music (now lost), Leclair is best remembered as a composer of chamber music who tried to unify the heretofore drastically different French and Italian styles. His music for larger ensemble comes primarily from two sets of six concertos each (Op. 7 and Op. 10), all of which feature violin solo, except for Op. 7, No. 3, which is for either solo oboe or solo flute. Jean-Philippe Rameau is, among our three French composers in this program, the best known today. His output is not extraordinarily large, but his works are important and influential. In music for the stage, his style is a curious but inspiring blend of the grand French operatic tradition of the genre’s founder, Jean-Baptiste Lully, and the more intimate, more floral prettiness of the Rococo style, aften epitomized by the music of François Couperin. Rameau was from Dijon, where his father was a church organist. At first destined for the law, Rameau disappointed his parents by wanting to become a musician. He would hold a number of organist positions in different towns during his early years but would settle in Paris around 1722/23; at this point, he was no longer a young man but rather a middle-aged man of 40. His career there was a bit slow in getting off the ground, despite the fact that early on in this phase of his life he was publishing books of music for the clavecin (harpsichord). Thanks to the help of a wealthy businessman patron, M. de la Pouplinière, Rameau would have his first big break in 1733 (at age 50) with the performance of his very first published opera, Hippolyte et Aricie. Rameau would go on to achieve success composing more operas in a similar vein, that is to say, what the French would call not “operas” but rather tragedies en musique, as well as other stage works in the genres of ballet, pastorale, opéra-ballet, and opéra comique. Other works include solo voice secular cantatas with instruments. His body of pieces for clavecin grew to 65, and he produced some examples of chamber music (the Pièces de clavecin en concerts, 1741) which were among the first (maybe the first) trios to have fully written out right hand parts for the keyboard, instead of having the keyboard player improvise chords in the right hand based on the figures found in the basso continuo line. Perhaps Rameau’s greatest contribution to music, however, comes not through his compositions but through his Traité de l’Harmonie (Treatise on Harmony, 1722), a monumental and groundbreaking work in the realm of music theory which established the principles of modern functional harmony (“tonality”) as we know and use them today. Dardanus premiered at the Académie de musique in 1739, enjoying a run of 26 performances. It is based on the character Dardanus, the son of Zeus and the Pleiad Electra. The mythology surrounding Dardanus is that he left his home in Arcadia, the pleasant groves in the mountainous Peloponnesus of Greece, and eventually, after a number of adventures, became the founder of the royal house of Troy. It is through this association with Troy, and its prince Aeneas, that Dardanus is seen as an ancestor of Rome, whose founder was, so Virgil’s Aeneid tells us, Aeneas. The action in Rameau’s Dardanus centers around one of the title character’s adventures: his war with King Teucer, whose daughter Iphise, already promised by her father to King Anténor, is secretly carrying on with Dardanus. All turns out well, as peace is ultimately attained and Iphise and Dardanus marry. © 2014 Thomas Gerber This recording is the realization of a long-cherished dream. I have always been fascinated by French Baroque music, with its peculiar balance of grandeur and finesse, étiquette and freedom, restraint and expression, elegance and majesty, décor and dancing, declamation and singing, symmetry and diversity, clarity and intricate ornamentation. However, whereas the French Baroque solo and chamber music was mostly written down with great care and detail, its typical style and extensive ornamentation clearly explained by numerous French treatises and descriptions, the orchestral music fared less well. Indeed, the compositions of Lully and his followers look disappointingly simple (not to say simplistic), with the occasional inevitable trill as sole ornament – in striking contrast not only to the contemporary chamber and solo music but also to all other art forms and genres of the Louis XIV-XV era. I could never understand how Lully's compositions, performed as they stand, could have had such a profound impact on European music history. Did this quite sketchy, bare and neutral-sounding music really have the power to take the world by storm? Was this the music that so many European kings or princes wanted to hear and to impress their visitors with in their Versailles-styled palaces? In this recording I want to brush a different picture, in keeping with the overall artistic ideas. A first source of inspiration is the contemporary transcriptions of Lully's orchestral pieces for solo harpsichord, such as made by Jean Henry D'Anglebert. These transmit highly ornamented versions which could very well reflect the actual performance style quite faithfully. Further crucial evidence comes from Georg Muffat, a German who had studied with Lully for many years. He gives extremely detailed instructions about the general style and about the specific bowing technique the string players should adopt. These bowing conventions are very different from modern usage and provide a crisp, very rhythmical and highly articulated declamation. This declamatory effect is enhanced even further by the many different ornaments which, according to Muffat and in accordance with D'Anglebert's transcriptions, any well-trained musician would have known to add to Lully's simple-looking notation. These ornaments often have the function of consonants in speech; they vary the beginnings of the vowels (or of the syllables) or link them to each other. The result is a much more understandable and emotionally far richer declamation of these remarkable compositions. Today, Muffat's bowings have sometimes been put into practice, but this application of ornaments almost never, and then mostly only in the top melody part, whereas Muffat explicitly wants them in all parts. Learning this new, unheard language was very exciting for all of us as performers. I hope it is as exciting to the listeners, being able to truly connect this music to the lavish splendor of Versailles. Telemann's name might astonish in this French context, but we should not forget that Lully's style was imitated and adapted thoughout Europe. In the German-speaking countries, French inspiration is found with Muffat, Fischer, Fux, Kusser, Pez, Telemann, J.S Bach and his cousins Johann Ludwig and Georg Michael. In England, Purcell and Handel adopted and adapted it, and sometimes even Italian composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi and Veracini are seen to include Lullian elements. The Telemann suite we record here is an early work (ca. 1716); it stands so close to Lully's tradition, that I wanted to apply the same basic approach as in Lully’s late work, the Ouverture and Passacaille of 1686. In France, even after Lully's death, his compositions continued to function as the fertile soil upon which composers such as Marais, Campra, Leclair and Rameau could develop their own style. This process seems to have been much more a rather slow evolution than a revolution. Consequently I did not hesitate to apply Muffat's principles of bowings and ornamentation also to the Rameau suite. It is interesting to notice however, that as time goes on, the ornamentation seems to become less ubiquitus and more standardized. Simultaneously the number of middle parts is reduced from three to two, each of them becoming increasingly specific, melodic and individual. The Leclair concerto (1737), roughly contemporaneous with the Rameau suite (1739), predictably shows the least Lullian influence; it is much more influenced by the Italian concerto style of Albinoni and Vivaldi. It stands at the other end of the spectrum – at one end Lully, the Italian who became the exponent of French style and taste; at the other end Leclair, the Frenchman who sounds almost Italian. The orchestral forces The peculiar sound balance of the French orchestra of those days is well documented. Whereas in the opera house the orchestra would have been quite big in order to fill the space, we have here opted for a smaller setting, as could have happened in any private chateau, but we kept the proportions between the different instruments alike. In the opera repertoire, up to and including Rameau, there is only one violin part, executed by many performers (here up to four) and often doubled by all flutes or oboes. The three (after ca. 1700 often only two) middle parts were all played on violas, but in much smaller numbers (here consequently one-to-a-part) and not doubled by any winds. The relative weakness of the viola parts in the tutti sections is thus not the consequence of bad engineering or microphone placement, but a deliberate choice, respecting the tradition of that repertoire! The bass part was very strong again, played by about the same number of performers as the top part, with bassoons doubling the string basses (we used three string basses besides the harpsichord and bassoon). In Lully’s compositions there is no 16-foot double bass, since this instrument was introduced in the opera only ca. 1700. When the texture changes from five to three parts, the violas do not play and the top part splits into two dessus parts, often played by solo violins, flutes or oboes. The basso continuo would then be given to harpsichord and string bass, or could be played by one viola alone. In the concerto repertoire, the accompaniment was mostly played by a simple string quartet of two violins, viola and violoncello, one-to-a-part, next to the harpsichord; a double bass could reinforce the basses during tutti sections. We followed that tradition. © 2014, Barthold Kuijken About Barthold Kuijken Barthold Kuijken was born in 1949; he grew up in a musical environment: two of his elder brothers were studying music and became increasingly interested in early music and early instruments. He studied modern flute at the Bruges Conservatory and the Royal Conservatories of Brussels and The Hague. Whilst studying he had the good fortune of finding a splendid original Baroque flute, which became his best teacher. Research on authentic instruments in museums and private collections, collaboration with various instrument builders, and study of 17th- and 18th-century sources helped him to specialize in the performance of early music on original instruments. Soon he started to play with his brothers Wieland and Sigiswald, with René Jacobs, Paul Dombrecht, Lucy van Dael, and with the harpsichordists Robert Kohnen, Gustav Leonhardt and Ewald Demeyere. He plays Baroque flute in Belgium’s “La petite Bande”, the Baroque orchestra conducted by his brother Sigiswald. He has recorded extensively for various labels (Sony classical, Harmonia Mundi-BMG, Philips-Seon, Accent, Arcana, Atma, Opus 111). Besides his activities as a flute (and recorder) player, he is appearing more and more often as a conductor. His scholarly work includes a new annotated Urtext edition of J.S. Bach’s flute compositions (for Breitkopf & Härtel). He teaches Baroque flute at the Royal Conservatories of Brussels and The Hague, and is often invited to serve as guest professor or as a jury member in international competitions.