FULL Leçons de ténèbres (Dalande) Rouen 2016 Sophie Karthäuser
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Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Leçons de ténèbres
- Composer: Delalande Michel Richard
- Libretto: traditional
- Venue & Opera Company: Chapelle Corneille, Rouen, France
- Recorded: 2016
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Sophie Karthäuser
- Conductor: Sébastien Daucé
- Orchestra: Ensemble Correspondances
- Chorus: Ensemble Correspondances
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: ALTEA MEDIA
- Date Published: 2023
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
It was as a specialist in female voices that Delalande composed these lessons, which were a real event during Holy Week.
Famous for his Symphonies for the King’s Soups — three chef’s hats in Philidor’s catalog, the Michelin star of Versailles music in the Baroque era — composer Michel Richard Delalande nonetheless prized spiritual nourishment. If, from 1683 until the end of the reign of Louis XIV, he made the motet à la française the main course of official religious services, he intended rarer and more frugal recipes for posh Parisian convents, in particular that of the Ladies of the Assumption, near the Tuileries. For these Augustinian nuns, he concocted three services of lessons in Darkness, suitable for sustaining pious souls during Lent, just before Easter. Begun at the end of the day on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of Holy Week, these nocturnal “readings” of the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah constituted a musical and social event, in a highly dramatized staging. In the darkness of the chapel, fifteen candles (symbolizing the twelve apostles and the three Marys) were extinguished one by one, over the verses sung. From Marc Antoine Charpentier to François Couperin, without forgetting Michel Lambert, the initiator of the genre, every great religious musician has tried it. The stamp specific to those of Delalande? Married to a renowned singer, Anne-Renée Rebel, father of two equally renowned sopranos, Marie-Anne and Jeanne, Delalande senior unfolded his vocal arabesques as a fine connoisseur of the resources of the female voice, particularly in the strings of vocalizations which introduce each “lesson”, on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.