Le Concert Royal de la Nuit
Ensemble Correspondances; Sébastien Daucé
harmonia mundi HMC 952223.24
The ballet Le Concert Royal de la Nuit was first performed in 1653. It can be seen as an act of homage to the young French king, the then 15-year old Louis XIV, who also danced the main part, that of the rising sun. A complete list of the performers has survived: it includes 24 princes and aristocrats, four courtiers and five children. We know that the author of the text was Isaac de Benserade. Jean de Cambefort was the most prominent composer of the music. The vocal music has been preserved but the instrumental music is based on a copy by Philidor, made half a century after the ballet’s performance. Philidor wrote out the top line and sometimes the bass line. It was left to the conductor, Sébastien Daucé, to reconstruct the implied but missing inner lines.
Often now record companies try to economize on the material provided. That is not the case here where the CDs come with a richly documented book of almost 200 pages that includes illustrations of the original performers and their costumes, illustrations taken from the material preserved at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. In one of his notes, Daucé mentions that he had originally intended to create a complete reconstruction of the original ballet, but that was not feasible. Instead, we have here all the vocal music as well as 51 of the original 77 dance sequences. This music is juxtaposed with selections from two Italian operas written for Paris: Ercole amante by Francesco Cavalli and Orfeo by Luigi Rossi. These operatic sequences are written in a rather different idiom than that of the dance music but they go together surprisingly well. The record also contains some earlier airs by Antoine Boesset (who had died in 1643): these provide an interesting contrast with the slightly later dance music. The music requires large forces to do it justice: I counted 16 singers and 34 instrumentalists. Everything is beautifully done.
