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La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers and Venus & Adonis

Operas of Charpentier and Blow

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers
John Blow (1649-1708) Venus & Adonis

Katherine Watson (soprano), Sabine Devieilhe (soprano), Samuel Boden (counter-tenor), Fernando Guimaraes (counter-tenor), Christopher Ainslie (counter-tenor), Reinoud Van Mechelen (counter-tenor), Virgile Ancely (bass-baritone), Lisandro Abadie (bass-baritone), Callum Thorpe (bass-baritone)

Jonathan Cohen Conductor
Les Arts Florissants

Les Arts Florissants are coming to Versailles to perform two “Royal Court” masterpieces, two chamber operas whose beauty remains dazzling, for two exceptional legends: the Loves of Venus and Adonis and those of Orpheus and Eurydice.

John Blow chose the legendary love of Venus and Adonis as a subject for his opera in three acts and a prologue which he composed for the court of King Charles II at the beginning of the 1680s. Following on from Ovid’s poem from The Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Blow sensitively and playfully takes on, not just the mythological subject, but also the flamboyant tonality of the English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. Although on the surface it shows French influences from Jean-Baptiste Lully, it is considered by some to be the very first known English baroque opera, a source of inspiration for the young Henry Purcell. From a libretto attributed to Anne Finch (née Kingsmill), Venus and Adonis depicts the love of the goddess Venus for the hunter Adonis, killed young whilst hunting.

Some years later (1686-1687), on the other side of the Channel, Marc-Antoine Charpentier composed La Descente d’Orphée aux enfers, a chamber opera in two acts, for the musicians of Mademoiselle de Guise. The libretto, by an unknown author, once again echoed the myth of Orpheus told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The story of the tremendous love between Orpheus and Eurydice that takes them to the Underworld is given a happy ending in this shortened version of the myth: Orpheus and Persephone succeed in convincing Pluto to bring Eurydice back to life.

Royal Opera of Versailles
Friday 13 January 2012 - 8:00 pm

Booking

Orchestre National de Montpellier

Concertos and operas by Mozart, Verdi and Puccini

Piano and orchestra concerto No. 9 and Don Giovanni (extracts), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
La Forza del destino (extracts), Giuseppe Verdi
Manon Lescaut (extracts), Giacomo Puccini

Csilla Boross (Soprano), David Fray (Piano)

Orchestre National de Montpellier Languedoc Roussillon
Victor Aviat Conductor

Production Château de Versailles Spectacles, Orchestre National de Montpellier, Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

Wednesday 25 January 2012 - 8:00 pm
Royal Opera of Versailles

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Dardanus

Lyric tragedy by Jean-Philippe Rameau

Lyric tragedy by Jean-Philippe Rameau with a prologue and five acts based on a libretto by Charles-Antoine Le Clerc de la Bruère. Second version of 1744.

Gaëlle Arquez, Konstantin Wolff, Benoit Arnould, Alain Buet, Sabine Devieilhe, Emmanuelle De Negri, Romain Champion

Ensemble Pygmalion
Raphaël Pichon Conductot

Rameau's fifth opera, Dardanus, which he originally composed for the Royal Academy of Music in 1739, met with scant success at first. Critics disliked not only the score for being what they considered too "rich", but especially the absurd, awkwardly constructed plot. Rameau took his contemporaries' criticism very seriously and completely revised the last three acts with his librettist La Bruère. The outcome was a brand new opera without supernatural excesses, stressing a more deeply human drama. The plot now focused on the main characters' conflicting feelings and emotions. This second version, which premièred in 1744, met with a lukewarm reception but was nevertheless performed many times (with regular changes). In 1760 Dardanus was at last considered one of Rameau's finest works.

The second version of Dardanus, which is superior from a dramatic point of view, has never been revived, except for the famous fourth act aria Lieux funestes, still deemed one of the most beautiful in the French counter-tenor repertory. The new production, based on the autographed and non-autographed manuscripts and printed editions available throughout the period the composer reworked Dardanus, features, for the first time, some of the most beautiful and inspired passages of a work perfectly illustrating French opera's development during the Age of Enlightenment. At first Rameau was totally influenced by the restrictive form of Lully's lyric tragedies and displayed a pronounced taste for "extraordinary" stories, but here a more intimate and human sense of drama blazes a very clear trail towards the classical period's psychological probing.
Pygmalion is supported by the Orange Foundation and the Ile-de-France Cultural Affairs Department-Ministry of Culture.
Production supported by Adami and Copie privée
Reduced price for CMBV members

Royal Opera of Versailles
Thursday 16 February 2012 - 8:00 pm

Booking

Didone Abbandonata

Opera of Hasse

Theresa Holzhauser, Magdalena Hinterdobler, Valer Barna-Sabadus, Maria Celeng, Andreas Burkhart, Flavio Ferri-Benedetti

Michael Hofstetter Conductor
Balázs Kovalik Direction
Hofkapelle Munchen

The composer Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) maintained a special link with Versailles. A prolific composer whose career in opera at Dresden and Vienna would bring him fame throughout Europe, he was invited by Marie Josèphe of Saxony, the second wife of the Dauphin, to come to Versailles in 1759 for three months. Marie Josèphe knew Hasse and his wife the opera singer Faustina Bordoni in her youth, and Hasse dedicated a manuscript score to her for his opera Didone Abandonnata, composed in 1742. This is a wonderful manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale: it was probably used for the performance of this work in Versailles on 28 August 1753.

This was a very special event: a complete Italian opera seria performed in Versailles. The libretto is obviously drawn from a legend that was well-known to the baroque audience, the tragic loves of Dido and Aeneas. The subject is more developed here than that of Purcell, Hasse wrote a grand opera and showed the warlike rivalries that will make Carthage fall, where Dido is the very coveted queen… Hasse’s splendid music, still baroque, very close to that of the younger Bach, and already heralding the arrival of Mozart, is a succession of arias about bravery, despair, entreaties and warlike flights of fancy: virtuosity and emotion are the driving force behind it.

This work is now being revived by Michael Hofstetter, previously the musical director of the Ludwigsburg Festival and with an expert knowledge of the unknown works of the second half of the 18th century: after having performed Salieri’s Les Danaides, Cimarosa’s Les Horaces et les Curiaces and Gluck’s Ezio, he brings Hasse’s Dido to life, the premier of which in Munich in March 2011 was a real event, with a magnificent cast and an elite orchestra, and conducted with a rare skill that glorified Hasse’s score, and will now be heard in France for the first time since 1753.

Royal Opera of Versailles
Saturday 10 March 2012 - 8:00 pm

Booking

Ariodante

Opera of Haendel

Joyce Didonato, Karina Gauvin, Marie-Nicole Lemieux, Sabina Puertolas, Nicholas Phan, Mattew Brook, Aninio Zorzi Giustiniani

Complesso Barocco
Alan Curtis Conductor

Royal Opera of Versailles
Thursday 15 March 2012 - 8:00 pm

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