Les Arts Florissants News

The final concert in Les Arts Florissants' 30th anniversary season focused on the French baroque repertoire that they have made their own.

While the Barbican has been hosting the bulk of the ongoing celebration of the 30th anniversary of Les Arts Florissants, this programme consisting of Monteverdi's Sixth Book of Madrigals transferred aptly to a smaller and more atmospheric venue.

Great works that mark the cusp of a new era have a special energy, almost like a tremor of anticipation.

Baroque opera may be a field of scholarly interest, but that doesn't mean it's weighty in content. The pieces by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, written in the late 1600s, that Opera Lafayette offered on Monday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater were as sugary and ephemeral as a plate of meringues.

There were entr'actes written to enliven comedies by Moliere. There was an opera-like work written as a diversion for an aristocratic salon -- a function you might even say it continued to fulfill by being performed for Monday's well-dressed audience. Its title, 'Les Arts Florissants,' is best-known as the name of an early-music group, rather than as gripping drama. It's an allegory in which the arts are redeemed by the peace brought about by King Louis XIV: in short, a frothy piece of propaganda or, more precisely, of brown-nosing.

STEPPING LIVELY: Dancer Caroline Copeland and Nathalie Paulin in rehearsal for Marc-Antoine Charpentier's "Les Arts Florissants." COMMENT 0 Comments Your browser's settings may be preventing you from commenting on and viewing comments about this item.

Les Arts Florissants is thirty years old, and the group is presenting a celebratory concert series at London 's Barbican Centre .

Les Arts Florissants's Dido & Aeneas at the Barbican, review Purcell's Dido, performed by Les Arts Florissants at the Barbican, needs to be concentrated for the closing Lament to have its proper effect.

Even the taxi driver's sat-nav struggled to locate William Christie's billet deep in the Sussex countryside, a cottage nestling among dense hedgerows and towering trees, with a soundtrack supplied by warbling woodpigeons.

The centrepiece of the second Aldeburgh Early Music Festival at Snape Maltings was the UK debut on Saturday of the French ensemble Le Concert Spirituel.

In the 1970s, a young American musician named William Christie , having received degrees at Harvard and Yale, decided to move to France.

Monteverdi, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria , Les Arts Florissants, W. Christie Virgin Classics 7243 4 90613 9 2 Claudio Monteverdi settled in Venice, as maestro di cappella at San Marco, but was not to return to the genre of opera until a couple years before his death.

It is well known how much we love William Christie here at Ionarts, so much so that we have suggested he be appointed American ambassador to France .

KRA'L ROGER Karol Szymanowski's homo-erotic take on Euripides's The Bacchae was a powerful if bewildering experience.

Preceding their release of Handel's Ezio , reviewed last week, Alan Curtis and Il Complesso Barocco rang in the Handel anniversary year with a long-awaited recording of Alcina .