Appearances to the contrary, I don't cover every new Christophe Rousset release; it's all I'd do. But the out early-music wizard is marking the 25th anniversary of his ace ensemble Les Talens Lyriques with a series of releases that warrant celebration, particularly because they represent ensemble growth. Rousset's brilliance was apparent, and acknowledged, from his debut as a harpsichordist; Les Talens Lyriques was barely more than a twinkle in his eye when it struck unlikely gold: its soundtrack for Farinelli, an Amadeus-imitative bio-pic about castrato Carlo Broschi, sometimes called opera's first superstar, sold as only the rarest classical CDs do �" in the hundreds of thousands of copies. So the band played on.
That 1994 CD sought to re-imagine the sound of a castrato by digitally blending the voices of a countertenor and soprano, which proved more spooky than enlightening. But the playing! The new remake, also called Farinelli (Aparte), retains the vocals of the original and a much more inclusive selection of music the castrato sang, this time with Ann Hallenberg, a mezzo-soprano who is, to the early-music world, as much diva assoluta as Anna Netrebko is to big-house opera.
Hallenberg is the vastly more disciplined singer, but the sense of fun suggested by the CD cover is the sheer revelry in crackling coloratura and arching line that was Farinelli's stock in trade. As with the earlier Farinelli, the hit number is the plangent "Ombra fedele anch 'io" from Broschi's long-forgotten opera Idaspe . You may know it from the 2007 movie Fracture, in which a "live" but soporific performance of it barely distracts an upscale LA audience. Hallenberg shows other ways it can be hypnotic.
Rousset's career is grounded in his being a polyglot of musical styles. No other ensemble purveying French Baroque music is better with this elusive idiom (the up-and-coming Rafael Pichon may yet prove his match), but his work is as acute in German and Italian music as it is in French. And though it remains concentrated in the life of Les Talens Lyriques, Rousset increasingly appears in opera-orchestra pits such as Vienna's and Covent Garden's, and lately is leaning into assignments including a forthcoming Massenet Werther, which would have seemed unthinkable (or Rousset might have thought little of) a quarter-century ago.
Then there are his incursions into "new" old repertoire. As a single example, in tandem with these anniversary releases is a new recording of Etienne Mehul's 1806 opera Uthal (Ediciones Singulares), which won't send Matthew Shilvock's advance-programming staff scrambling but does draw attention to a transitional composer whose music warrants investigation.
Still, some of Rousset's best work has been with the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and in the anniversary year he weighs in with Lully's last, 1686 opera, Armide, generally regarded as the composer's best and the work that perfected the genre of tragedie en musique that would yield the great works of Rameau and others. It's Rousset's sixth recording of a Lully opera (Aparte; in live performance, as usual), and it both crowns the work that comes before it and demonstrates the qualities that have made Rousset's music-making reliably artistic stretches in every sense, not the least the introduction of new singers.
Lully's rich, plentiful music for dance in his operas, tailored to the tastes of Louis XIV, reflects the composer's own multifaceted talents as a dancer and conductor as well as composer. Regrettably, it's exactly where many recordings of his operas bring on the longueurs. Rousset's keen sense of the rhythms of the French court makes the dance episodes sparkle in his recordings. Recorded in concert in the new Pierre Boulez Salle of the Paris Philharmonie in December 2015, this new Armide moves along at a clip onstage dancers might find daunting, and in fact it leads to some smudged diction from Rousset's mostly Francophone cast. But the compensation is that the drama is never slighted.
The emotional grit of the story of the sorceress Armida and her love-hate affair with the knight Rinaldo, from Torquato Tasso's 16th-century Crusades epic, has entranced opera composers from Monteverdi (whose Armida opera is lost) and Gluck to Dvorak and, in 2005, Judith Weir. Lully, setting a superb libretto by Philippe Quinault, took to it in what the accompanying notes chronicle as a particular thorny time in his life. Only one of his troubles was the scandal caused by his sexual dalliance with one of Louis XIV's musical pages, which resulted in the lad's being packed off to a monastery and Lully's forfeit of the king's unwavering support.
What it bequeathed to posterity was an opera rich with drama and magic, passion and pastoral. Antonio Figueroa holds his own as the bewitched knight Renaud, but the vocal show is Marie-Adeline Henry's as Armide. She wields a pungent voice with contrasting sweetness, and the full palette of colors needed to realize this fabulous crooner of "Save me from love"; her big set-pieces ending acts two and five are alternately hair-raising and spell-binding. Douglas Williams' Hidraot appears only in Act II, but he raises hell's furies vocally, too.