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GRAMOPHONE (01/2025)
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Harmonia Mundi HAX8904097

 Code barres / Barcode : 3149020951606

Reviewer : David Vickers

William Christie explores the essential function that music had in Molière’s comedies, although this is not exactly a ‘new’ album because two-thirds of its running time is recycled from Les Arts Florissants’ 1990 account of Charpentier’s Le malade imaginaire (Théâtre du Palais-Royal, 1673). Otherwise, 25 minutes of content was recorded piecemeal between 2013 and 2023 in three different venues – most of it captured live in concert at the Philharmonie de Paris in November 2022. The total result is a disjointed mishmash that is less coherent than Les Paladins and Jérôme Correas’s admirable ‘Molière à l’opéra’ (Glossa, 12/16). However, Les Arts Florissants tackle a few undeniable rarities during an entertaining overview of several comédieballet collaborations between Lully and Molière, and, after they fell out badly, the playwright’s turn to Charpentier instead.

The Ballet des magiciens, a burlesque in honour of Venus, was part of Lully’s La pastorale comique, within Molière’s larger Le ballet des Muses (Saint-Germain, 1667). The goddess of love is praised sarcastically by three sorceresses, hammed up to the max by the male trio David Tricou, Bastien Rimondi and Cyril Costanzo (Molière’s wordplay turns each refrain into ribald laughter). After the crash and bang of the Turkish ceremonial march from Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), Lully’s intimate lyricism is evident in the shepherdess Cloris’s heartbroken rondeau ‘Ah! mortelles douleurs!’ from George Dandin (Versailles, 1668); its three verses are divided inexplicably albeit exquisitely among Emmanuelle de Negri, Claire Debono and Virginie Thomas; its obbligato for two violins is played tenderly, supported impeccably by harpsichord and theorbo.

Comedy returns in an over-the-top performance of Charpentier’s trio of Grotesques (Cyril Auvity, Marc Mauillon and Lisandro Abadie) from the 1672 revival of Le mariage forcé; ‘La, la, la, la, bonjour’ pokes fun at the commedia dell’arte excesses of an Italian company that had recently been sharing the Théâtre du Palais-Royal with Molière’s troupe, and matters deteriorate into farce when the singers imitate barking dogs (to hammer the satire home, Christie’s fiddlers are deliberately out of tune). Lully’s contribution to Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (Chambord, 1669) is represented by Debono’s gleeful Egyptian gypsy woman and a raucous chorus. After sizeable chunks from Le malade imaginaire, a brief postlude is provided by Christie and Justin Taylor playing a harpsichord duet arrangement of Lully’s Turkish march.

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