Diversity and representation are banging on the doors of the world's concert halls and operas houses in ways those institutions ignore at their peril. If that's slightly less true in the case of recorded music, it's because the un- or under-represented repertoires and artists can park and hawk their wares to the audiences they address with less administrative and institutional baggage.
In the "received" classical repertoire, though, there's less room to move. Pastiche as it is typically practiced, to present the work of a single artist, has fairly well worn out its existing formats, perhaps because of a world on Shuffle. The solo-singer album, particularly when the fare is opera arias, has shown it cannot be saved by theme-y programs with dreamy titles.
So, when a program does comes along that's fired with imagination and doesn't just "package" the music, it's a revelation, and a welcome one. Two new treatments of French Baroque music - which is still in the process of gaining the commitment of the early-music audience in America - have taken the trouble to be strange but honestly so, compelling deeper, repeated listening.
"Enfers" (Harmonia Mundi) is just such an achievement, a cassoulet served with hot sauce. Pygmalion, the first new French period ensemble to pull up alongside Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyrique and say "Salut, We're here," owes its keen, already integrated profile as a creative collective to the vision of its director, Raphael Pichon. With "Enfers" it invites along the out French baritone Stephane Degout, who has shown a similar interest in expanding his repertoire beyond "opera singer" to tackle both "new" and "early" music. (He's one of the singers on whom George Benjamin has composed his new opera, now in rehearsal at Covent Garden.)
The fit seems perfect, not least because the French is authentic. The musicians who take us through this Hell commit to a project for now, not a design for the future.
It wouldn't take musicians of this caliber of imagination to make a pastiche buffet of opera excerpts about Hell, but a project with less substance and direction would surely succumb to cuteness at some point. Instead, Pichon has drawn freely from the practice of the funeral of Jean-Philippe Rameau, a Concert-Spirituel that drew on religious music as old as the Requiem of Jean Gilles, then interpolated apposite selections from Rameau's operas - the tragedie-lyriques - to make a new work of occasional music.
Pichon's annotators call this new pastiche work a "Mass for the End of Time." It has a narrative draped gracefully across the liturgical sections of the traditional requiem. Its composite story is told by The Tragedien, here Degout at his most stylistically flexible and dramatically persuasive. The new drama plunges listeners into the deepest regions of hell, gracefully making its way to a hushed, ecstatic Elysium.
Had Rousset done such a thing, which he well might have and yet might, it would have had a different character. He and his musicians can dazzle you one minute and make you weep the next with musicianship that is, paradoxically, fundamentally relaxed, in that "We've got this; you enjoy" manner. Pichon, his own man in a world of copiers, has consistently demonstrated his depth and integrity if, by contrast, as a leaner, hungrier, more palpably intense leader.
Pichon draws his secular music largely from the operas of Rameau ("Castor et Pollux," "Hippolyte et Aricie" and others) and the "French" Gluck, primarily "Orphee et Eurydice." The music spans a dramatic arc with a precise shape and emotional inevitability. The purely instrumental interludes range from the wildness of Rebel's "Les Elements" to the sublimity of Gluck's "Ballet des Ombres heureuses," and function as connective tissue, not breaks.
This masterful pastiche takes hold of you and walks you through this particular Hell like Beatrice does Dante. While the landscape has its fiery terrors, you never want to be anywhere else. This is music-making so bold and self-confident that it locates you, then takes you somewhere else, in all senses moving you the whole time. If by chance you've sensed that there was in the music of Gluck something beyond staid formality, this will be your illumination.
Taking the opposite tack, pianist Pavel Kolesnikov draws you through a program of the 17th-century keyboard music of Louis Couperin on a modern piano (Hyperion). I found the idea so preposterous on its face - music for a mean-tuned harpsichord on an equal-tempered modern grand - that I was sure Kolesnikov, a musician of curiosity and daring coupled with consummate taste, was onto something.
The natural dissonances of this music are different on a modern instrument, to be sure, but Kolesnikov lets the fundamental strangeness of it all be his and his listeners' lure. I can count on the fingers of one hand the pianists who have wreaked comparable wonders with French harpsichord music. Kolesnikov's rapt playing is almost frighteningly intimate.