French Baroque composer Marin Marais is primarily known for his inward-looking viol music, but he also worked as a "measure beater" at the Académie royale de musique, the institution that evolved into the Paris Opéra, and he wrote vocal music of various kinds, as well. This disc presents instrumental excerpts from Marais' 1709 opera Sémélé. These excerpts are dances, marches, and slightly longer orchestra passages -- "symphonies," "préludes," an overture, and "entreés" for groups of personages that appear on-stage in the opera. Many are quite short, and they seem a bit bare when heard shorn of context -- a few sung airs, well placed, would have enlivened the program. But the music, which has apparently never been recorded before, suggests something of the splendor of the French opera of the period. Marais' orchestra is large, with recorders, oboes, bassoons, trumpets, percussion, and supposedly more than 20 strings -- in which case the
Montréal Baroque ensemble that appears here seems to be a little small. The music, illustrative of the opera's multiple settings, is vivid, and contradicts any conception the listener may have about the homogeneous nature of Baroque instrumental groupings. Hear the oddly piercing combination of recorders and viol, with continuo, in the "Symphonie tendre" from the Prologue, track 8. Act Four, set in a village, has various fascinating realizations of the pastoral idea; the hurdy-gurdy that appears in this section is a welcome and colorful development. Several interludes depict natural phenomena -- crudely by the standards of, say, Vivaldi or Beethoven, but in ways that must have been surprising enough in the context of the original production. Hear the "Tremblement de la terre" (Trembling of the ground), track 30 -- in the words of annotator François Filiatrault, "it may be easy to smile today at the naivety with which the Ancients imitated nature, but such attempts in fact often led them to devise new and ingenious musical practices."
Montréal Baroque and its conductor,
Wieland Kuijken, gives the music the sumptuousness it deserves, and the balances within the large grouping of instruments reveal plenty of charming details. The Atma label's Super Audio sound fits beautifully with the concept, and the disc as a whole is a fresh manifestation of Montreal's vibrant early music scene. This disc will be of interest to anyone who likes Marais or the other composers of the French Baroque, and it is likely to inspire wishes that the same group of musicians be involved in a future realization of the entire opera from which the music is taken.