Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)
Dies irae
Te Deum

Chœur Allabastrina
Allabastrina Consort
Elena Sartori, direction

Jean-Baptiste Lully! Irrésistible ascension d’un petit italien ramené en France pour amuser Mademoiselle. Par ses aptitudes éblouissantes, il apprend très vite le violon, la danse et la composition réussissant à gagner les faveurs et l’estime de Louis XIV. Compositeur attitré de la Cour, il crée l’Académie Royale de musique (futur Opéra) et se fait nommer au poste tout-puissant de Surintendant de la musique, réussite incontestable mais peu encombrée de scrupules d’aucune sorte. Plutôt cité pour ses comédies-ballets avec Molière et ses tragédies lyriques, il composera quelques œuvres sacrées dont ces Dies Irae et Te Deum, ce dernier de triste mémoire puisqu’il meurt de gangrène après s’être frappé le pied en battant la mesure. Le Dies Irae, d’inspiration fastueuse, sorte de Requiem simplifié, représente clairement la musique française du grand siècle dans toute sa rigueur et sa majesté. Alors que Le Te Deum reste une œuvre d’une dimension authentiquement royale avec chœurs, trompettes et timbales entraînant, malgré tous ces fastes grandioses, une certaine lourdeur. L’organiste et Chef d’Orchestre Elena Sartori, forte de sa formation aux Mozarteum de Salzbourg et Bach académie de Stuttgart, donne une interprétation somptueuse dans un style parfois conventionnel mais bien soutenue par les musiciens de l’Allabastrina Choir. (Philippe Zanoly)

The maestro of Versailles, the pioneer of high French Baroque style: isn’t that the uncontested place awarded by posterity to Jean-Baptiste Lully? The Italian musicologist and conductor Elena Sartori would have us think differently, with this fascinating act of rediscovery that works from a logical point of origin: Lully’s place of birth, Florence, as Giambattista Lulli. Her aim with this new recording is to reinterpret a pair of the composer’s grand motets through the prism of his Italian heritage. As Sartori notes in her booklet essay, the magnificent Te Deum shares little of musical style or text-setting in common with Lully’s operas. The ornamentation and stylised, asymmetric rhythms that are woven through the texture of his dramatic works and those of his successors such as Rameau are notable by their absence; she finds, instead, ‘a deep-rooted, maternal sense of melody, and an enduring, even unwitting memory of Latinate language that leads the work away from factional claims (of national style).’ The Dies Irae is still further removed from norms of French style; the handling of the chorus is closer to Carissimi and the instrumental parts to Corelli. Accordingly, she has produced new performing editions of both works. She conducts them with the vocal and instrumental ensemble which she recently founded in order to give historically aware performance of dramatic music from the Italian Renaissance and Baroque eras. The result of her scholarship is to bring a more immediate sense of drama, even danger, to the multi-part Dies Irae, and a greater urgency of celebration than is customary to the Te Deum setting. Anyone who follows Lully’s music and the French Baroque will want to investigate this new recording, which was made in the Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna: a Byzantineera building with its own complex history which lends an imposing sense of space to the interpretations.