After ‘Stravaganza d’amore’, their superb album of late sixteenth-century Florentine music, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion return to Italy, this time to Mantua. Here they offer us their reading of one of the peaks of sacred music from this period: Monteverdi’s Vespers. Revealing like no other interpreters the poignant interiority of these pieces, they bring out to the full their inherent sense of theatre. An overwhelming experience.

Bach and Pygmalion: the story of a passion linking the genius of the Thomaskantor to a reflection on inner drama and constantly renewed vocality. This Matthäus Passion marks a major stage in this fifteen- year companionship and testifies to the culmination of their work on Bach, characterised by its precision and humility. Read through the prism of a tragedy in five acts, at once intimate and theatrical, human and metaphysical, the Passion is revealed here in a new light: as a deeply moving epic exploring the very heart of Lutheran spirituality.

After ‘Stravaganza d’amore’, their superb album of late sixteenth-century Florentine music, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion return to Italy, this time to Mantua. Here they offer us their reading of one of the peaks of sacred music from this period: Monteverdi’s Vespers. Revealing like no other interpreters the poignant interiority of these pieces, they bring out to the full their inherent sense of theatre. An overwhelming experience.

Late sixteenth-century Florence was a theatre: first and foremost a political one, in the eyes of the dynasties that wished to use the arts to display their power. A humanist one too, as is shown by these intermedi (interludes) that sought to achieve the perfect blend between music and poetry, the ideal of a certain Renaissance. Inserted into plays imitating the ancient writers, these entertainments were presented with lavish visual and musical resources. After reaching an initial peak in 1589 with the intermedi composed for Bargagli’s La pellegrina, this tradition was prolonged in the burgeoning genre of opera by such composers as Peri, Caccini (Euridice, 1600) and, very soon, Monteverdi (L’Orfeo) and Gagliano (Dafne).

At the height of the famous Querelle des Bouffons (1754), the elderly Rameau yielded to insistent requests from the Académie Royale de Musique for a major revision of Castor and Pollux, 17 years after the lukewarm reception of its premiere. He deleted the Prologue and made substantial modifications to the dramatic structure, with a completely new first act! But the original has continued to overshadow the revision, unjustly so when one considers the modernity of its orchestration. The inspired direction of Raphaël Pichon shows the extent to which this music heralds the Classical orchestra.

Alpha presents the reissue of Ensemble Pygmalions version of Dardanus, conducted by Raphaël Pichon and recorded in the majestic acoustics of the Opéra Royal at Versailles Palace. This set won multiple awards on its first release: Rameau, a flinty-hearted composer lacking in imagination? Rameau, a cold mathematician in his chord progressions and a severe draughtsman in his vocal lines? One need only listen, in Dardanus, to the melancholy laments of Princess Iphise, splendidly sung by the soprano Gaëlle Arquez, to realise the treasures of tenderness and invention that still remained in the youthful heart of the fifty-six-year-old composer! . . . This version, which fills an important gap in the discography, possesses all the assets needed to speak to us today, and to last.

In 1646, France's first minister, Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, eager to bring Italian culture to Paris, hired Luigi Rossi to write an opera for the Paris carnival. The premiére was given a magnificent staging and the performance, which lasted six hours, was a triumph. However, the expense of the performance only stoked discontent against Mazarin, which soon broke out into full-scale popular rebellion. On this video, Raphaël Pichon and Ensemble Pygmalion recreate the magic of that first performance, thanks to a skillful musical reconstruction and the group's vibrant, multi-colored timbre. The dramatic power of the myth of Orpheus is brilliantly conveyed in Jetske Mijnssen's production, which transposes the story into contemporary terms, to evoke the timeless experience of love and death that humanity both desires and fears.

One morning in 1822, Schubert wrote down an enigmatic text in which all his ghosts seem to take shape: wandering, solitude, consolation, disappointed love. Inspired by this dreamlike narrative, Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion and Stéphane Degout have devised a vast Romantic fresco, combining resurrection of unknown treasures with rediscovery of established masterpieces.

Great sorrow and great joy, expressed in in sacred and secular arias and cantatas, are the themes of Sabine Devieilhe’s album of Bach and Handel. Recorded with the Pygmalion ensemble and conductor Raphaël Pichon, it features appearances by baritone Stéphane Degout and lutenist Thomas Dunford and includes Bach’s cantatas ‘Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut‘ and ‘Jauchzet Gott in allen Lande’, and excerpts from Handel’s Brockes Passion and Giulio Cesare. “This is possibly the most personal programme I’ve recorded so far,” says Sabine Devieilhe, “and I’ve been lucky enough to record it with the Pygmalion ensemble and my husband Raphaël Pichon. We really wanted to convey the idea of human emotion that at times goes beyond our understanding, and which creates music of extraordinary drama.”

Between Die Entführung aus dem Serail and the advent of the famous ‘Da Ponte trilogy’, Mozart threw himself frantically into the search for the right libretto, capable of taking the spectator to lands still unexplored where the drama and the psychology of the characters would be sublimated by the music. Hence, in the years between 1782 and 1786, he set up a veritable laboratory for dramatic music: a musical corpus of concert arias, sketches, and stylistic exercises like the canon – here brilliantly organised as an imaginary dramma giocoso in three scenes, each heralding in its own way one of the summits to come: Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così.

The funeral of Louis XIV mirrored his reign: grandiose and filled with pathos. Raphaël Pichon has chosen the setting of the Chapelle Royale in Versailles, built ‘for the use’ of the Sun King, to present a musical reconstruction of the event, with chiaroscuro lighting designs by Bertrand Couderc. Solemn grands motets like the De profundis and Dies irae of Michel-Richard de Lalande and the poignant Marche funèbre pour le Convoy du Roy by André Danican Philidor are juxtaposed with rarely heard music by Jean Colin, Louis Chein and Charles d’Helfer. An outstanding performance by Pygmalion, filmed on the occasion of the tercentenary of the event, in November 2015.

The funeral of Louis XIV mirrored his reign: grandiose and filled with pathos. Raphaël Pichon has chosen the setting of the Chapelle Royale in Versailles, built ‘for the use’ of the Sun King, to present a musical reconstruction of the event, with chiaroscuro lighting designs by Bertrand Couderc. Solemn grands motets like the De profundis and Dies irae of Michel-Richard de Lalande and the poignant Marche funèbre pour le Convoy du Roy by André Danican Philidor are juxtaposed with rarely heard music by Jean Colin, Louis Chein and Charles d’Helfer. An outstanding performance by Pygmalion, filmed on the occasion of the tercentenary of the event, in November 2015.