[…] Le contre-ténor, qui dirige également l’ensemble Artaserse, s’immerge dans ces partitions avec une virtuosité mais également un engagement dramatique de tous les instants. Il nous entraîne dans un véritable voyage spirituel, nous guidant d’une voix dont on connaît la parfaite pureté, l’élégance, mais aussi la capacité d’interpréter la plus impalpable des émotions, la plus violente colère comme la plus extatique des joies. Un album qui finalement nous remplit de lumière en ces temps, parfois, de profond découragement…
Imaginez ce que cela donnera dans vingt ans ou quarante ans. Je ne serai plus là pour l’écouter, encore moins en parler. Mais il va entrer en plein dans cet âge du chanteur, du musicien qui de créateur et interprète devient un maître, un brûleur de pistes dans des forêt inconnues et vierges pour d’autres qui auront le courage de le suivre. Il est vrai qu’il n’est pas seul, qu’il ne sera pas seul dans cette perspective que j’aimerais pouvoir suivre encore pendant quarante ans. Jouissez de cette beauté. Et c’est la première fois que j’emploie le mot, car c’est un mot creux s’il n’est pas précédé de tout ce que je viens de dire. […]
with Pacific MusicWorks co-Artistic Director Stephen Stubbs
There are a few elements of historical performance that, for obvious reasons, ought to remain in the past. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the majority of male operatic leading roles were written for castrati, who most often sang in the soprano or mezzo-soprano range, and were particularly valued for their virtuosity and almost super-human breath control. Obviously, most modern countertenors don’t fulfill that first basic necessity of the soprano range (most would qualify as altos), but then in the early 2000s a major new talent burst onto the scene in the form of the young French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. Beyond the sheer beauty of his voice and his highly-developed yet instinctive musicality, he possessed two even rarer qualities – the high tessitura of a mezzo-soprano, and the extreme virtuosity that could make sense of the wildest melismas that any baroque composer had devised. Suddenly, the vast repertoire of the castrati had a living advocate that could bring it back to life in our time!
We began our collaboration with Philippe in 2011 when he embodied the virtuoso role of Anfione in Agostino Steffani’s 1688 opera Niobe. How we came to work with Philippe on that project is part of the next chapter, but the result was this: a wildly successful stage production of Niobe by Gilbert Blin for the 2011 Boston Early Music Festival starring Philippe and Amanda Forsythe, followed by a recording on the Erato label which has received much glowing press and prizes, and finally a concert tour of Europe in 2014, (and unquestionably due to Philippe’s status as a European superstar) playing to full houses at some of the best halls in Europe from Madrid to Paris to Amsterdam.
In the next installment of OrfeoBlog, I will share how Amanda Forsythe, one of our favorite leading ladies, was chosen to be part of this exciting partnership. Stay tuned!
[…] E con lui Philippe Jaroussky (Sesto, figlio quindicenne di Cornelia) il quale ha dovuto confrontarsi con il personaggio quasi adolescenziale. È questo uno dei limiti dell’opera lirica (quando la cinquantenne Marilyn Horne vestiva i panni di Arsace, figlioletto di Semiramide-Caballé, c’era qualcosa di grottesco…). Jaroussky ha 41 anni, ma il ragazzino scattante lo sa ancora fare, e qui la vocetta acuta di controtenore aiuta la sua credibilità. […]
El contratenor francés Philippe Jaroussky presenta este martes 9 de abril a las 19.30 horas, en el Teatro Arriaga de Bilbao, su nuevo disco ‘Ombra Mai Fu’, íntegramente dedicado al compositor italiano Francesco Cavalli
[…] A l’Opéra-Comédie, l’entrée en matière m’est familière : Ombra mai fu (ma partition sur le piano ) et bien sûr le résultat est à couper le souffle…. La voix est tellement aérienne qu’on ne sait plus où sont les respirations, les ornements et les apoggiatures sont des broderies d’une finesse absolue qu’il place là où le commun des mortels glisserait une respiration salvatrice ! […]
This is a hugely enjoyable collection of opera arias by the seventeenth-century Italian composer Francesco Cavalli sweetly sung by the forty-year-old French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky.
This disc provides just over an hour’s worth of musical pleasure as Jaroussky shows us that he has lost none of his vocal suppleness nor his beautiful silvery tone. […]
Only the Sound Remains is a chamber opera by Kaija Sariaho based on two Noh plays translated by Ernest Fenellosa and Ezra Pound. The piece was premiered in Amsterdam in 2016 by Dutch National Opera, where it was recorded. It’s a co-pro with Teatro Real, Finnish National Opera and the COC so Toronto audiences will likely get a look at it eventually. Which is good because it’s really hard to figure out much of it from the video recording. As he so often does, peter Sellars directs for both stage and camera and while I like his stage work here I find his video direction quite annoying, especially in the first piece.
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