CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Les Arts Florissants

Zankel Hall
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 7:30 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 6:30 PM in Zankel Hall with William Christie.

Les Arts Florissants
William Christie, Director
Claire Debono, Soprano
Ana Quintans, Soprano
Isabelle Druet, Mezzo-Soprano
Paul Agnew, Haute-Contre
Christophe Gautier, Baritone
Jonathan Sells, Bass
Serge Saitta, Flute
Florence Malgoire, Violin
Ada Pesch, Violin
David Simpson, Cello

CHARPENTIER Te Deum à 4 voix, H. 147
LULLY Salve regina
CHARPENTIER Concert pour quatre parties de violes
LULLY Regina coeli
CHARPENTIER Le Reniement de St. Pierre , H. 424
CHARPENTIER Magnificat, H. 73
MARAIS Cinquième suite en trio
·· Prélude
·· Fantaisie
·· Gavotte
·· Rondeau
·· Caprice
·· Passacaille
CHARPENTIER Litanies de la Vierge, H. 83

Presented by Carnegie Hall in partnership with The Juilliard School.

Program Notes:

By Robert Mealy

MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Te Deum à quatre voix, H. 147
Born 1643 in or near Paris; died February 24, 1704, in Paris.

Charpentier spent much of his career in the shadow of Jean-Baptiste Lully, who had managed to gain control over nearly every form of staged music-drama through his court connections. The one genre over which Charpentier had undisputed mastery during his lifetime was that of sacred music in Latin. Here he perfected an art of musical rhetoric that he may well have learned from the Roman master Carissimi, whose works Charpentier heard during his years in Italy. This Roman influence doubtless appealed to the Jesuits when they decided to appoint Charpentier, “the most profound and the most knowledgeable of modern composers,” (as Brossard described him) to be music director for their Parisian operations.

The Jesuit church in Paris was the Église Saint-Louis, whose façade can still be admired today. Their services were among the most spectacular of an age that prized theatricality in its devotions as much as in its operas. One contemporary account describes the scene: “All around the church were seen more than 4,000 lighted candles, not counting the candelabra that illuminated the altar … Through the use of machinery, the Host was lowered into the hands of the Bishop.” This literal deus ex machina was accompanied by “a magnificent concert of music made up of the best of the King’s singers and reinforced by those of the church, who are excellent.”

One of the texts Charpentier set for the Jesuits was the Te Deum, which was always sung on the occasion of a French military victory. Charpentier composed several versions of this important text; his setting with trumpets and drums, H. 146, served for many years as the composer’s best-known work. The Te Deum à quatre voix, H. 147, is a smaller affair, with an ensemble of soloists alternating with strings and tutti voices. Catherine Cessac has suggested that this might well have been composed for the French victory at Charleroi in October 1693. Whatever its occasion, the work is full of vigorous declamation and graceful dancing rhythms, all marked with Charpentier’s characteristically rich harmonies.

JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY Salve regina
Born November 29, 1632, in Florence; died March 22, 1687, in Paris.

Jean-Baptiste Lully is best known today for virtually inventing the tragédie-lyrique, creating a series of stage works that served as the staple repertory of the French Opéra for more than a century. Ironically, this godfather of the classical French style was himself Italian. In his operas, he carefully cultivated the art of French declamation in music, listening attentively to the great actors of the time and learning from the subtle airs de cour of his father-in-law, Michel Lambert. But he also kept abreast of the latest developments in Italian music. His small-scale settings of devotional motets show the influence of contemporary 17th-century Roman masters. These works are set for three voices and continuo, a characteristically Italianate scoring, and reveal that Lully was well aware of composers like Rossi and Carissimi, whose discourses of imitative counterpoint he here translates into a French accent.


MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Concert à quatre parties, H. 545

Over the course of his highly productive career, Charpentier kept a sort of musical journal of his work, in an ongoing effort to preserve his music in a series of cahiers or notebooks. This huge anthology, known as the Meslanges, serves today as his collected works. Scattered among the wealth of oratorios, litanies, and small operas in the Meslanges are various instrumental pieces, some intended for specific occasions and others seemingly created simply for the delight of his patrons. The Concert à quatre parties falls into this latter category. Unusually, this short suite of dance movements is scored in four parts, rather than for the more common chamber ensemble of two trebles and a bass. This texture provides Charpentier with an opportunity to show what care he always takes with all the voices of his music, even the less prominent inner parts; unlike Lully, there is never the sense that he has farmed out the completion of a musical sketch to students or assistants.

This suite opens with an abstract Prélude, full of contrapuntal and harmonic richness. After a more straightforward Allemande, the Sarabande is in the form of a rondeau, with episodes or couplets scored for a petit chśur of three instruments. Next follow two gigues. The first is à l’Anglaise, set in what we think of as the gigue’s characteristic dotted triple rhythm with a kind of rustic good humor reminiscent of English country dances. The next is à la Française, in a striking and unusual common-time rhythm. The suite is closed with a spacious Passacaille, again with episodes scored for smaller forces; the opening music returns occasionally, but Charpentier varies the form cleverly, so it is not an exact rondeau.


JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY Regina coeli

Although Lully is best known for his theatrical works, he also wrote his share of church music. Along with several grands motets for use in major ceremonies at the royal chapel, he also composed a series of petits motets sometime between 1660 and 1687. Scholars believe that these works were first intended for the Parisian convent of the Assumption, located in the rue Saint-Honoré. Although most French services were performed in plainchant, there were frequent opportunities for short devotional motets to be inserted during the course of a service, and so there was always a demand for small-scale devotional music.


MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Le reniement de St. Pierre, H. 424

Charpentier’s Reniement is one of his greatest masterpieces, but curiously it does not appear in his own collection of works, the Meslanges. Instead, this work survives thanks to Charpentier’s colleague and admirer Sébastien de Brossard, a passionate advocate of the Italianate arts of musical rhetoric in France and an assiduous collector. Brossard’s manuscript copy describes this work as “a story or oratorio in the Italian style about Saint Peter’s denial and repentance, for five voices cum organo.”

As Brossard’s description indicates, Charpentier is here working very much in the Italian oratorio tradition of discourse through music, creating a vividly persuasive narrative using extreme economy of means. The text closely follows Matthew, with a few additions from the other Gospels, and the composition was probably used as a devotional work during Passion Week services. Only occasionally does Charpentier use word-painting to “enact” a particular word in music. One especially moving moment occurs at the crux of the story, when Peter denies Christ for the third time. After the cock crows and Peter realizes what he has done, the ensemble sings together “Tunc” (or “then”)—and then there is silence, as Jesus gazes upon Peter, and his disciple realizes what he has done. The ending of this relatively austere work releases the tension of the story in a series of flowing melismas on “flevit amare” (“he wept bitterly”). Charpentier repeats this phrase 33 times, creating astonishingly rich harmonies as the suspensions build up on top of each other.


MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Magnificat, H. 73

Like many of his colleagues in the visual arts, Charpentier decided as a young man to make an extended visit to Italy to learn what that rich culture could offer him. One especially striking result of this immersion in another culture is his Magnificat à 3 voix, which he composed around 1670, shortly after his return from Italy. Cast in what Charpentier described (in a list of Energie des modes or key-charactistics) as the “severe and magnificent” key of G minor, this work is a tour-de-force of compositional ingenuity. The entire text of the Magnificat is set over a descending ostinato (in French, a basse ostinée—an obstinate bass) that repeats 89 times in the course of the piece. This descending tetrachord is a hallmark of 17th-century Italian music, and Charpentier’s use of it here shows his deep appreciation for Italian style; characteristically, he weaves lines of French grace and elegance over this Italianate bass, creating a kind of gout-réunis or reunion of styles long before François Couperin dreamt of such a thing.


MARIN MARAIS Excerpts from Cinquième suite en trio pour les flutes, violon, et dessus de viole
Baptized May 31, 1656, in Paris; died August 15, 1728, in Paris.

The great viola da gamba virtuoso Marin Marais had close associations with both Lully and Charpentier. His early musical studies were with François Chaperon, Charpentier’s predecessor at the Sainte-Chapelle and the butt of Charpentier’s own mock-epitaph, the Epitaphium Carpentarii. Marais then refined his virtuoso technique with the most famous viol player of the age, the Sieur de Sainte-Colombe. Marais joined the Opéra orchestra at a young age. By 1676, when he was only 21, Marais was playing continuo for the first performance of Lully’s Atys at court. He went on to join the Musique de la chambre de Roi. Many of Marais’s trios (including the suite heard tonight) appear not only in published form, but in a manuscript entitled “Trios pour le coucher du roy”—”music performed during the elaborate evening ceremonial in the King’s bedchamber.”

The fifth suite of his Pièces en trio, in what Charpentier described as the “loving and plaintive” mode of E minor, opens with an extended Prélude which explores several themes, including a mournful descending chromatic line and a brisker section marked gayement, before ending with a sober gravement section. Among the other movements of this extended suite are a Fantaisie (that is, a piece not following any particular dance-form), an affecting Sarabande en rondeau, where the opening music returns at the close, and a mournful Caprice, full of sighing graces and charged intervals. The suite closes with a grand Passacaille, which is itself a kind of miniature opera.

MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER Litanies de la vierge à 6 voix et 2 dessus de violes, H. 83
Tonight’s concert closes with a particularly splendid setting of the Litany for the Virgin, also known as the Litany of Loreto. Charpentier set this extended text nine times. Although most of his litanies were composed for the Jesuits, this one was clearly intended for his first great employer Marie de Lorraine, known as Mademoiselle de Guise, a pious and extremely wealthy noblewoman who kept an impressive musical establishment in her Parisian hôtel particulier. According to Titon du Tillet, Charpentier moved into an apartment in the vast Hôtel de Guise soon after his return from Italy in 1670. He remained with Mlle. de Guise until her death in 1688. This litany was likely composed around 1683 or 1684; the names of the singers involved (including Charpentier himself, who served as haute-contre as well as composer for Mlle. de Guise) are listed in the Meslanges.

The text of the Litany of Loretto is an extended series of invocations to various qualities of the Virgin. Charpentier arranges this medieval Latin text into separate musical episodes, each one ending with the response “ora pro nobis” or “pray for us.” These sections are linked together by ritournelles provided by the two treble instruments (in this case, violins). Although the predominant key is the “grave and devout” mode of D minor, Charpentier modulates to other keys, particularly to the “severe and magnificent” G minor at the intense prayer “Salus infirmorum, Refugium peccatorum …” He also transforms the meter at each successive cycle of prayers, creating an ever-intensifying sense of rapture. This work is a remarkable example of what Charpentier’s colleague and admirer Sébastien de Brossard described as the Stylus Motecticus, “a style which is varied, florid, and adaptable to any kind of ornamentation, consequently suitable for expressing diverse passions, especially admiration, awe, grief, and so forth.”

Violinist Robert Mealy frequently contributes program notes to Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, and other musical organizations.

Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Les Arts Florissants
William Christie, Director
William Christie, harpsichordist, conductor, musicologist and teacher, is the inspiration behind one of the most exciting musical adventures of the last 25 years. His pioneering work has led to a renewed appreciation of Baroque music in France, notably of the 17th- and 18th-century French repertoire.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Mr. Christie studied at Harvard and Yale universities, and has lived in France since 1971. He founded Les Arts Florissants in 1979; as Director of this vocal and instrumental ensemble, Mr. Christie soon made his mark in both the concert hall and the opera house with new interpretations of largely neglected or forgotten repertoire, beginning g with the production of Atys by Lully at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1987.

His affection for French music does not prevent him from exploring other European repertoire, and he has given acclaimed performances of works by composers from Monteverdi, Rossi, and Scarlatti to Purcell, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart. His extensive discography of over 70 recordings with Harmonia Mundi and Warner Classics / Erato is proof of this versatility.

Mr. Christie has an increasingly busy operatic career and his collaborations with renowned theater and opera directors, including Jean-Marie Villégier, Robert Carsen, Alfredo Arias, Graham Vick, and Luc Bondy, among others. Much in demand as a guest conductor, he receives regular invitations from the prestigious opera festival Glyndebourne, Zurich Opera, Opéra national de Lyon, and the Berliner Philharmoniker.

He is equally committed to the training and professional development of young artists, and he has nurtured several generations of singers and instrumentalists over the last 25 years. From 1982 until 1995, Mr. Christie was a professor at the Paris Conservatory. He continues to give master classes and lead academies like those at Aix-en-Provence and Ambronay. He recently created an academy for young singers in Caen, called Le Jardin des Voix that has received much interest in throughout Europe and in the US.

Mr. Christie acquired French nationality in 1995. He is an Officier dans l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur as well as Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Letteres.

LES ARTS FLORISSANTS
The vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants is one of the most renowned and respected early music groups in Europe and around the world. Dedicated to the performance of Baroque music on original instruments, the ensemble was founded in 1979 by the Franco-American harpsichordist and conductor William Chrsitie, and takes its name from a short opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Les Arts Florissants has been largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in France in 17th-century French repertoire as well as in European music of the 17th and 18th centuries more generally. This was repertoire that had, for the most, been neglected but is now widely performed and admired.

Since the acclaimed production of Atys by Lully at the Opéra Comique in Paris in 1987, it has been in the field of opera where Les Arts Florissants has found most success. Notable productions include works by Rameau, Charpentier, Handel, Purcell, Mozart, and Monteverdi.

The ensemble has collaborated on productions with such renowned stage directors as Jean-Marie Villégier, Robert Carson, Alfredo Arias, Pier Luigi Pizzi, Jorge Lavelli, Adrian Noble, Andrei Serban, Graham Vick, and Deborah Warner, as well as with choreographers Francine Lancelot, Béatrice Massin, Ama Yepes, Shirley Wynne, Maguy Marin, François Raffinot, Jiri Kylian, Bianca Li, and José Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu, to name but a few.

Les Arts Florissants has an equally high profile in the concert hall and on disc, as illustrated by their many acclaimed concert performances of opera as well as secular chamber works, sacred music, and a large number of choral works.

Les Arts Florissants has also embarked on contemporary repertoire, giving the premiere of Motets III—Hunc igitor terrorem by Besy Jolas in 1999 to mark the group’s 20th anniversary.

The ensemble has an impressive discography: more than 40 recordings for Harmonia Mundi and some 30 on the Warner Classics / Erato label. As part of their collaboration with EMI / Virgin Classics (since 2003), Les Arts Florissants recently issued a live CD of the concert of the second session of Le Jardin des Voix, the group’s academy for young singers.

For 15 years, members of Les Arts Florissants have been artists in residence at the The Théâtre de Caen, and each year they present a concert season in the Basse-Normandie region. The ensemble also tours widely within France, and is a frequent ambassador for French culture abroad; the ensemble is regularly invited to the Brooklyn Academy, Lincoln Center in New York, the Barbican Center in London, and the Vienna Festival.

Claire Debono, Soprano

Ana Quintans, Soprano

Isabelle Druet, Mezzo-Soprano

Paul Agnew, Haute-Contre

Christophe Gautier, Baritone

Jonathan Sells, Bass

Serge Saitta, Flute

Florence Malgoire, Violin

Ada Pesch, Violin

David Simpson, Cello