CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Jean-Paul Fouchecourt
Stephen Stubbs

Weill Recital Hall
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, Tenor
Stephen Stubbs, Guitar and Lute

ATTAINGNANT "Tant que vivrai en âge florissant"
MOULINIE "Paisible et ténébreuse nuit"
"Entrée de luth"
"Courante"
"Branle de village"
DE LA BARRE "Rondeau sur le movement de Chaconne"
LE CAMUS "Quand l'amour"
LULLY from Atys
·· Allons, allons accourez tous, Cybèle va descendre
·· Sommeil d’Atys
LULLY "Récit de la beauté"
VISÉE Prelude
LULLY / MÉDARD Trio from Atys, Act IV
LAMBERT "Par mes chants"
LAMBERT "Trouver sur l'herbette"
LAMBERT "Vos mépris"
LAMBERT "Ma bergère"
MONTEVERDI "Eri già tutta mia"
MONTEVERDI "Quel sguardo sdegnosetto"
KAPSBERGER "Figlio dormi"
FOSCARINI "Sinfonia pizzigate"
FOSCARINI "Fulias variate"
KAPSBERGER "Canario"
CACCINI "Amarilli, mia bella"
CACCINI "Belle rose porporine"
BUSATTI "Angela siete"
CORBETTA Prelude
CORBETTA "Chiacona"
ROSSI "A quel dardo il cor si deve?"
ROSSI "Mio core languisce"
STROZZI "L'amante segreto"
STROZZI "Amor non si fugge"

Encore:
STROZZI "Amor dormiglione"

Program Notes:

By Stephen Stubbs

At the turn of the 17th century, musicians and poets set out to create a new and daring kind of music. Although every generation creates something new in all the arts, this departure was unusually fundamental, even revolutionary. Learned societies in Florence and other Italian cities and courts, at the center of the ferment, strove to restore to music the powerful emotional impact it had in ancient Greece. They believed that music should be moved from its traditional place in the quadrivium of the liberal arts, where it was grouped with the abstract or scientific realms of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, to a new home next to poetry and rhetoric. The close association of music with the verbal arts engendered new forms, like opera, oratorio, and cantata, and—most importantly—it created, in the person of the individual singer, an idealization of the human. The new idea spread throughout Europe, and for the century to come, all the best composers and poets would devote their highest art to providing singers and their accompanists with a “musica poetica” that would honor this ideal.

If music of the late 16th century was a pan-European “lingua franca,” the new art, in contrast, attached itself variously to the different European languages, each with its own characteristic sounds, verbal gestures, and expressive modes. Our program features outstanding 17th-century vocal music from Italy and France. The juxtaposition of national styles allows the listener to experience the rich diversity of idioms that is at the same time unified by the high aspirations and genius of the composers and the consistency of the medium.

FRANCE

By one description, it could be said that the new ideas I have spoken of so far arrived with the delay of about a generation from Italy to France. In particular, the innovation of composing over a figured bass—the concept of continuo—which was practiced in Italy from around 1600, was virtually unknown in France until the 1640s. By another accounting, however, one could say that French musicians, poets, and intellectuals simply chose to emphasize a different aspect of “classical” (ancient Greek) art—that of versification. The French idea attached a musical value to the long and short syllables in a line of poetry, which engendered a different form of musica poetica, which they dubbed musique mensurée à l’ancienne. This idea, when strictly applied, can make music that seems stilted or telegraphic but in the hands of musical poets like Étienne Moulinié, it produces a charming asymmetry in note values that effortlessly brings the poem to the fore and melodies that seem to break free from the tyranny of the beat and the bar line.

Pierre Attaingnant represents the earlier Renaissance style, in which music conceived for four vocal lines is distilled into a single sung line with the lute filling in the other voices. This works best for the homophonically conceived French chanson (as opposed to the contrapuntal contemporary madrigal) and “Tant que je vivrais” is a charming example of how well such arrangements can work.

Etienne Moulinié was the director of music for Gaston d’Orleans, younger brother of Louis XIII, and published a series of books of airs de cour for voice and lute. In the case of his third book, he included songs with guitar accompaniment from Spain, Italy, and his native Languedoc alongside his superb examples of the central French idiom with lute. The lute parts, for 10-course Renaissance lute, are gracefully conceived for the instrument and are stylistically derived from the solo music by lutenist-composers like Robert Ballard.

Robert Ballard published his first lute book in 1611, and in the following year he was employed to be the lute tutor of the regent Maria de’ Medici as well as the young King Louis XIII. His music, which features dance pieces from the ballets de cour, became the model for a generation of lutenists. In particular his doubles were the definitive representation of the arpeggiated or broken-chord style later dubbed style brisé. His pseudo-rustic Branle de village marks the beginning of a fashion that would culminate with Marie-Antoinette’s “peasant village” in the gardens of Versailles.

The next generation of French composers is represented here by three of its most important songwriters: Joseph Chabenceau de la Barre, Sébastian le Camus, and Michel Lambert. This generation adopted the Italian innovation of the basso continuo and formed it to the needs of the French language and style. Extending the genre of the air de cour as epitomized by Moulinié, they concentrated much of their artistry on the creation of variations, called doubles, of a complexity never seen before nor since. Luckily for modern performers, there is a highly informative “user’s guide” to this repertoire in the form of Benigne de Bacilly’s Remarques curieuses sur l’art de bien chanter (1668). This remarkable book uses his own compositions as well as those of Lambert for musical illustrations. One important point among many is his insistence that singers should study these complex doubles “for months” before singing them in public. This forms a particularly stark contrast to the spontaneity of ornamentation that was so prized among Italian singers.

Michel Lambert takes on a historical significance even beyond his brilliant contributions as a composer and singer in his unique alliance to the great lion of French music in the second half of the century: Jean-Baptiste Lully. A combination of talent, luck, genius, and political savvy must explain the meteoric rise to dominance that this Florentine-born composer, violinist, guitarist, and dancer achieved. His close personal relationship with King Louis XIV was certainly his most important support, but another important alliance achieved through marriage was that with Lambert, who furnished Lully with doubles for his son-in-law’s airs, never claiming credit for these contributions until after Lully’s death in 1687.

Lully’s Atys
I hope a personal digression will be allowed here, since it was the celebrated production of Lully’s Atys in 1986 that brought me together with Jean-Paul Fouchecourt for the first time. Particularly memorable to me is the sleep sequence where in over 50 performances around the world, I was one of the two onstage gold-costumed lutenists and Jean-Paul was the golden-voiced “spirit of Sleep.” Only many years later, while playing through the little guitar book of Rémy Médard from 1676 (the same year as the original production of Atys), I discovered his delightful guitar-solo version of the trio in Act IV (where Jean-Paul sang accompanied by an onstage guitarist as it had been accompanied in 1676). It is entirely possible that Médard was that original onstage guitarist, which led to this adaptation.



ITALY

Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali provides an unusual link between the worlds of French and Italian music. Almost all of the interaction in the first half of the century consisted of wave upon wave of Italian music, ideas, and musicians being transported to France. In this case, Monteverdi was adapting some French practices surrounding the ballet de cour as part of his armory for the creation of the many court Balli, which were demanded of him in Mantua. This was certainly the case for the first collection of Scherzi musicali in 1607. By 1632—the volume from which our pieces are taken—it served him as a platform for formal experiments in a lighter style. In particular, two pieces were conceived as variations over the bass pattern of the Ciacona, one is the tongue-in-cheek lover’s plaint “Quel sguardo sdegnosetto,” the other the famous tenor duet “Zefiro torna.”

Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger was a lutenist of German descent who spent most of his career in the employ of the powerful Roman Barberini family. His vocal music was sometimes extravagant, even bizarre, but his little Villanelle Figlio dormi, shows him in tenderest lullaby mode, yet with a charming variety of rhythms and time signatures.
 
Giovanni Paolo Foscarini, whose academic nickname was il furioso, was an Italian guitarist and composer who traveled widely and published both in Rome and Paris. He is considered the most important guitarist of his generation and the one who did most to bring the artful plucking of the lute repertoire into the music of the guitar, which had previously been a largely strummed instrument. His Sinfonia pizzigate is, as the name indicates, an entirely plucked toccata. His version of the popular Folia bass combines the traditional patterned strumming of the guitar with lutenistic plucking. This mixed style became the trademark of most of the important baroque guitarists who came after him. The great lutenist and chitarrone player Kapsberger promised a volume of guitar music that he never delivered for publication. This Canario from his fourth book for chitarrone (1640) seems to betray its origins as a composition for guitar, never using the characteristic bass strings of the chitarrone.

Giulio Caccini was the man who formulated the “manifesto” of the new art of singing in Italy ca. 1600, just as Bacilly did for the French art in the second half of the century. In his preface to Le nuove musiche of 1602, Caccini represented the ideas cultivated in the famous Florentine Camerata of Giovanni de’ Bardi of the 1570s and ‘80s. In particular he extols the expressive power of the solo voice with the accompaniment of a single instrument—Caccini names the Chitarrone as the “best accompaniment of the tenor voice”—but manuscript evidence suggests that he might have meant what we now call the archlute. On the one hand he cultivated a style of song in which “one could almost speak in tones,” “employing a certain noble negligence,” of which “Amarilli, mia bella” was the internationally famous example. On the other, he wrote rhythmically lively dance-songs like Bella rosa porperina.

Cherubino Busatti is almost unknown today. Of his seven books of published solo arias, only three are extant. His superb aria “Angela siete” uses an unusual basso ostinato—two octaves of a descending scale—and erupts in the end into the concitato or “warlike” style developed by his more famous Venetian contemporary, Monteverdi.

Francesco Corbetta was by far the most important guitarist of the generation after Foscarini. He can be credited amongst other things with being the father of the French school of guitar playing after he was brought to that country by Cardinal Mazarin (see below). Even more well traveled than Foscarini, he served Louis XIV of France and Charles II of England. He crowned his career by dedicating two books, both entitled La guitarre royalle, to each of these monarchs.

One personality forms the connecting thread between Italy and France in the 17th century more than any other: Cardinal Mazarin. In 1622 Kapsberger’s Apotheosis of Ignatius Loyola was performed at the Collegio Romano featuring the 19-year-old Giulio Mazarini in the main role. Later, as Cardinal Jules Mazarin, he was to become the most powerful man in France and the primary supporter of Italian culture at the French court. From 1634 to 1636 he was in Paris as papal nuncio, and he took the opportunity to present Cardinal Richelieu with a collection of the best contemporary Roman cantatas (now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris). This collection features a preponderance of music by Luigi Rossi, including the two pieces on our program. Later Mazarin managed to bring Rossi himself to France for the performance of his opera Orfeo in 1647.

Barbara Strozzi, a famous singer, and muse of the academy her father Giulio established, the Accademia degli Unisoni, was unrivalled in her generation of Italians as a composer for the solo voice. Today her songs testify to what must have been her extraordinary presence as a singer of her own songs.

Monteverdi, Rossi, and Lully were the seminal masters of Baroque opera, but it is also the many gifted and lesser-known composers here like Strozzi, Moulinié, Busatti, and Lambert, who, restricting themselves to the intimate art of the solo song, have bequeathed us an unusually rich and complex picture of the vocal music of the early Baroque.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, Tenor
Jean-Paul Fouchecourt is acknowledged as one of the main interpreters of the French Baroque repertoire. Although his performances and over 65 recordings of works by Rameau, Lully, and Campra have received critical acclaim, he has developed his repertoire to include composers ranging from Berlioz and Offenbach to Britten and Verdi.

His career has taken him to the major opera houses and orchestras around the world. He has performed numerous roles with Les Arts Florissants under the baton of artistic director William Christie, Les Musiciens du Louvre conducted by Marc Minkowski, Netherlands Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Antwerp Opera, Paris Opera, Aix en Provence Festival, Chorégies d’Orange, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Edinburgh Festival, Opéra de Lyon, Geneva Opera, Salzburg Festival, Berliner Philharmoniker, Opera de Bordeaux, Saito Kinen Festival, Boston Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and BBC Proms. Mr. Fouchecourt has worked with conductors including James Levine, Marc Minkowski, William Christie, René Jacobs, Charles Dutoit, Seiji Ozawa, Myung-Whun Chung, Valery Gergiev, James Conlon, and Sir Simon Rattle.

Mr. Fouchecourt is well known for his portrayal of the title role of Rameau’s Platée, having performed the part at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Paris Opera, Opera de Bordeaux, Geneva Opera, New York City Opera, and with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. In 1996 William Christie invited Mr. Fouchecourt to join Les Arts Florissants in performances of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Indes galantes, Les fetes d’herbe, and a highly acclaimed production of Lully’s Atys. Mr. Fouchecourt has also performed extensively with Marc Minkowski’s orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre, highlights of which include Hippolyte et Aricie, Lully’s Phaeton, Marais’s Alcyone, Mondonville’s Titon et l’Aurore, and Handel’s Resurrection.

Highlights of past engagements include Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at the Aix en Provence Festival, Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Salzburg Festival, Arnalta in L’incoronazione di Poppea conducted by Christophe Rousset at the Netherlands Opera , Il ritorno di Ulisse at the Geneva Opera, Basilio in Le nozze di Figaro at the Aix en Provence Festival and Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, La Calisto at the Theatre de la Monnaie (Brussels), Le Mari in Les mamelles des Tirésias at the Paris Opera, L’enfant et les sortilèges with the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, and Britten’s Les illuminations with the Orchestre du Capitole Toulouse conducted by Michel Plasson.

Future engagements include Remendado in Carmen and Guillot de Montfortaine in Manon at the Metropolitan Opera, Blind in Die Fledermaus with the Saito Kinen Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa, Guillot de Montfortaine at the Opéra d’Avignon, Arnalta in L’incoronazione di Poppea with Opéra de Bordeaux, the title role in Platée at the Paris Opera, and Monsieur Triquet in Eugene Onegin at Opéra de Lyon.

Stephen Stubbs, Guitar and Lute
After a 30-year career in Europe, musical director and lutenist Stephen Stubbs recently returned to his native Seattle to establish his new opera company, Pacific Operaworks.

With his direction of Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, he began his career as opera director and simultaneously founded the ensemble Tragicomedia, which has since recorded numerous CDs and completed tours of Europe, North America, and Japan. Stubbs has been invited to direct opera productions in Europe, the US, Canada, and Scandinavia. Since 1997 he has co-directed the bi-annual Boston Early Music Festival opera. The Festival’s recording of Conradi’s Ariadne was nominated for a Grammy award in 2005, and their recording of Lully’s Thesee was nominated in 2007.

Stephen Stubbs created the ensemble Teatro Lirico; the group made its recording debut in 1996 with the CD Love and Death in Venice. A live recording of Antonio Sartorio’s Orfeo of 1672 for Vanguard Classics was awarded the Cini Prize for best opera recording of 1999. Teatro Lirico now records for ECM records. The ensemble’s debut CD on this label was a New York Times “pick of the year” for 2006.

Stubbs’s solo lute recordings include the music of J. S. Bach, S. L. Weiss, David Kellner, and the Belgian lutenist Jaques St. Luc. With Baroque harpist Maxine Eilander he has recorded Sonate al Pizzico, released on ATMA ina 2004. Since the inception of the Dowland Project on ECM, he has played on all the group’s recordings.

To cultivate the singers and players of the next generation, he founded an early opera course called the Accademia d’Amore in 1997. Beyond this annual August workshop now located in Seattle, there is a series of weekend workshops during the year under the auspices of the Seattle Academy of Baroque Opera.

The year 2009 will see the debut of his new Seattle-based opera company Pacific Operaworks with a production of Monteverdi’s Ulisse, designed and stage-directed by South African artist William Kentridge.