Two exquisite dishes of English music: The Last Rose and Begin The Song

With an exquisite refinement, these two albums yet very different published by Harmonia Mundi will fill the lovers of English music from the seventeenth century. “” The Last Rose » highlights Mathilde Vialle and Thibaut Roussel’s violence of Mathilde at Archiluth, while Begin the song ! The prime contractor is the countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian.

The imagery of England of the restoration of the monarchy often associated music with food: “If Music Be the Food of Love”, it was already singing in The Night of Kings from Shakespeare. The Odes in Sainte-Cécile from the end of the seventeenth century, explicit celebrations of the holy patroness of music (of which the program of the CD of Paul-Antoine Benos-Djian) partially established themselves on a banquet always appreciated by the public and the performers. It is thus to a double feast that the music lover today is invited.

The CD entitled “The Last Rose”, in homage to both the symbol of the English rose and the song “‘Tis the Last Rose of Summer” on which it ends, is the twelfth of the series of albums initiated by the program “Stradivari: The Grand Instrumentarium” has led for a few years by the Music Museum of Paris. Intended to highlight two masterpieces of the collection of the museum recently rehabilitated, the Basse de Viole du Luthier English John Pitts (1679) and the Archiluth of Luthier Christoph Koch (1654), active in Venice to the middle of the seventeenth century, he built a clever and enticing program around these two instruments. In addition to a few well -known classics, including the song “Greensleeves” or the famous “Music for a While” by Purcell, it has rarely heard pages of composers feather like John Blow, John Playford, John Coprario, Tobias Hume, Girolamo Kapsberger, Pietro Reggio, Francis Wity or Benjamin Hely. Note the presence of Italian composers residing in London, that of Germans emigrated to Venice or English trained in Italy. This fascinating program, at the crossroads of the French, German and Italian influences, also makes it possible to make unpublished unpublished people heard recently exhumed to the National Library of France thanks to the discovery of a manuscript that belonged to a certain Anthony Poole, Catholic English violist who took refuge in Saint-Omer. If the manuscript contains some anonymous pieces, in particular very beautiful dances suites played here at La Viole, à la Archiluth and Virginal, there are also pages of Anthony Poole himself, a musician who had been able to benefit during his years spent in Rome from the rich musical life of the Papal capital. His compositions, although bearing the name of Roman martyrs particularly venerated by the Jesuits, are no less real dance movements which all mark the ambiguous character of beautiful musical pieces oscillating between the layman and the sacred. The listener will have no trouble getting enchanted by these pages which know how to mix sobriety and refinement, interiority and liveliness, meditation and life force. The remarkable instrumentalists (Mathilde Vialle and Thibaut Roussel with which the harpsichordist Ronan Khalil mixes) are joined for a few beaches by the tenor Zachary Wilder, who lends his instrument to the slightly dry stamp but to the impeccable driving for half a dozen vocal pieces very welcome. One of them, the air “music for a while” extracted from John Dryden’s play Oedipus Make to music by Purcell is found on the album by Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian.

Entitled “Begin The Song”, the first recital of one of our best French counterpétenors is a tribute supported to Henry Purcell and composers, younger or older, who rubbed shoulders with this major figure in English music. Two pieces of the program, “So Ceas’d the Rival Crew” by John Blow and Jeremiah Clarke “The Glory of the Arcadian Groves” were written to celebrate the premature death of the musician rightly nicknamed the “Orpheus Britannicus”. Next to a few large “tubes” from Purcell, the well -known extracts of King Arthur et The Fairy Queensome tunes drawn from different odes, including one in Sainte-Cécile or the sublime air “o solitude” formerly immortalized by Alfred Deller, we will discover much less known pieces of certain contemporaries like John Ecles, William Croft or a certain “Mr. Barrett”. Proof of the musical vitality of this pivotal period of English life where, after the closure of theaters ordered by Cromwell at the time of Interrene, the return to England of the monarchy led to a revival of musical activity in the fields of life: the court, the theater, the concert hall, the tavern … To the delights of the programming are joined by those of interpretation. We cannot dream of a better diction or more flexible and more creamy voice than that of Pierre-Antoine Benos-Djian, who signs a striking album. Wonderfully surrounded, for a duo each, by the countertenor Paul Figuier and by the Jean-Christophe Lanièce baritone, he also benefits from a miraculous accompaniment. We also find there, this time at the Théorbe, Thibaut Roussel, player of the Archiluth from the previous album. With Justin Taylor to the organ and to the virginal, Thétime Langlois de Swarte and Sophie de Bardonnèche at the violin, Hanna Salzenstein with the cello and Louise Pierrard at La Viole de Gambe, all the elements are gathered for a success that should count for many in the discovery of this Purcéllian universe which still conceals some spells to be known. A disc that we want to listen to a loop and from which we should not get tired.

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