Médée (Medea) | Charpentier
A tragedy in a prologue and five acts to a libretto by Thomas Corneille, Médée was Marc-Antoine Charpentier's first and last collaboration with the Académie royale de musique. When the work was premiered on 4 December 1693, Charpentier, at the height of his career, was exactly fifty years old. Louis XIV attended the performance, proof that it was an eagerly awaited event. However, Médée, a dark drama that baffled audiences, was withdrawn after just ten performances... We had to wait until 1976 to hear it again. Hervé Niquet, a specialist in the French repertoire and a familiar face at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, where he has been following all the advances in research and historically informed interpretation for 35 years, has endeavoured to present this new Médée by scrupulously applying the scientific information available to date.
Information
Produced by Alpha Classics.
Coproduced by Le Concert Spirituel, Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, Alpha Classics / Outhere Music France.
Recorded in March 2023 in the auditorium of the Cité de la musique et de la danse in Soissons.
Programme co-produced by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, Le Concert Spirituel and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
Score by Nicolas Sceaux for Le Concert Spirituel-Hervé Niquet.
Physical and digital release on 05 January 2024.
Duration: 170 min
Cast
Véronique Gens Médée
Cyrille Dubois Jason
Judith van Wanroij Créuse
Thomas Dolié Créon
David Witczak Oronte
Hélène Carpentier La Victoire (Victory) / Nérine / l’Amour (Love)
Adrien Fournaison Le Chef du peuple (the People's leader) / Un habitant (an Inhabitant) / Un Argien (an Argian) / La Vengeance (Revenge)
Floriane Hasler Bellone
David Tricou Un berger (a Shepherd) / Le premier Corinthien (the First Corinthian) / Un Argien (an Argian) / Le troisième captif (the Third Prisoner) / Un démon (a Demon) / Le troisième fantôme (the Third Ghost)
Fabien Hyon Un berger (a Shepherd) / Arcas / Le deuxième Corinthien (the Second Corinthian) / La Jalousie (Jealousy)
Jehanne Amzal Une Italienne (an Italian woaman) / Cléone / 1re bergère (1st Shepherdress) / 1re captive (First captive) / 1er fantôme (First Ghost)
Marine Lafdal-Franc La Gloire (Glory) / 2e bergère (Second Shepherdress) / 2e captive (Second Captive) / 2e fantôme (Second Ghost)
Hervé Niquet music direction
Orchestra et Choir Le Concert Spirituel
For the second instalment of his Baroque tetralogy, which began in 2023 with a dazzling version of Marin Marais' Ariane et Bacchus (Ariadne & Bacchus), the conductor of the Concert spirituel brings out the best in his choir and orchestra, engaged from the prologue to the denouement in a lively narrative in which the theatre emerges from the music.
Sophie Bourdais - Télérama January 2024
After so many years of being prevented by Lully's operatic privileges from performing anything other than pastorals and religious music, Charpentier finally made it to the Opéra stage at the age of 50. He had already won over the public with his Malade imaginaire, a comedy-ballet produced with Molière twenty years earlier.
Médée represented Charpentier's "great work", the culmination of all his work on the voice, an exceptional example of orchestral richness, a drama magnificently brought to life thanks to Thomas Corneille's libretto, the tragic and all-consuming destiny of Médée: a masterpiece! However, the reception given to this Médée by Parisians was not up to the work's standard, not fashionable enough... and Charpentier definitively gave up confronting the cabals that were already making the Opéra the place for all kinds of plots! Médée thus remained Charpentier's only lyric tragedy, and even today it makes us regret all the others he might have written had fate, politics and Lully decided otherwise.
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