by Daniel Hathaway

Thanks to groups like William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants and Debra Nagy’s Les Délices, who have made it their primary business to interpret French baroque music for twenty-first century ears, that special, highly stylized repertory now comes to life on a regular basis. Cleveland-based Les Délices has today issued its second CD, Myths and Allegories, with music by Jean-Féry Rebel, Thomas-Louis Bourgeois Michel Pignolet de Montéclair and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre based on tales from The Odyssey credited to the Greek epic singer, Homer (probably there were many of him). The album, featuring soprano Clara Rottsolk, with Debra Nagy, baroque oboe and recorder, Julie Andrijeski, violin, Emily Walhout, viola da gamba, and Michael Sponseller, harpsichord and organ, was recorded by Peter Nothnagle in Harkness Chapel at CWRU in March of this year.

Subjects drawn from classical antiquity were important to French baroque artists and musicians, and the story of Ulysses’s torturous return to Ithaca after the Trojan War was rich with possibilities. This recording begins and ends with movements from Rebel’s Ulysse (his only attempt at opera), and incorporates cantatas by Bourgeois and de la Guerre depicting the lure of the Sirens and Ulysses’s sea battle with Neptune in retaliation for the blinding of Polyphemus. [Read more…]