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Marc Minkowski
Marc Minkowski (born 4 October 1962) is a French conductor of classical music, especially known for his interpretations of French Baroque works, and is the current general director of Opéra national de Bordeaux. His mother, Mary Anne (Wade), is American, and his father was Alexandre Minkowski, a Polish-French professor of pediatrics and one of the founders of neonatology. Marc Minkowski is a Chevalier du Mérite. Life and career Marc Minkowski was born in Paris. His maternal grandmother, Edith Wade, was a violinist. He began his musical career as a bassoonist for René Clemencic's Clemencic Consort and Philippe Pierlot's Ricercar Consort. In 1982, Minkowski formed "Les Musiciens du Louvre", an orchestra dedicated to showcasing French Baroque music which has championed works by Marin Marais (opera '' Alcyone''), Jean-Joseph Mouret (opera ''Les amours de Ragonde''), Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste Lully (opera '' Phaëton'' at Opéra National de Lyon) and Jean-Phili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marc Minkowski
Marc Minkowski (born 4 October 1962) is a French conductor of classical music, especially known for his interpretations of French Baroque works, and is the current general director of Opéra national de Bordeaux. His mother, Mary Anne (Wade), is American, and his father was Alexandre Minkowski, a Polish-French professor of pediatrics and one of the founders of neonatology. Marc Minkowski is a Chevalier du Mérite. Life and career Marc Minkowski was born in Paris. His maternal grandmother, Edith Wade, was a violinist. He began his musical career as a bassoonist for René Clemencic's Clemencic Consort and Philippe Pierlot's Ricercar Consort. In 1982, Minkowski formed "Les Musiciens du Louvre", an orchestra dedicated to showcasing French Baroque music which has championed works by Marin Marais (opera '' Alcyone''), Jean-Joseph Mouret (opera ''Les amours de Ragonde''), Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste Lully (opera '' Phaëton'' at Opéra National de Lyon) and Jean-Phili ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Les Amours De Ragonde
''Les amours de Ragonde'' (''The Loves of Ragonde'', original title: ''Le mariage de Ragonde et de Colin ou La Veillée de Village'') is an opera in three acts by Jean-Joseph Mouret with a libretto by Philippe Néricault Destouches. It was first performed at the Château de Sceaux in December, 1714. It is one of the first French comic operas. Performance history Mouret was in charge of the ''Grandes Nuits de Sceaux'', musical entertainments put on every fortnight by the Duchesse de Maine at her chateau at Sceaux. For the 13th night, in 1714, Mouret and his librettist wrote ''Le mariage de Ragonde et de Colin''. Comedy was something of a novelty in French opera and the work looks forward to the genre of '' opéra comique'' which would become popular in the mid-18th century. Mouret also parodied many famous scenes from the prestigious '' tragédies en musique'' by Jean-Baptiste Lully, including moments from '' Armide'', '' Atys'' and '' Alceste''. The next time the opera was he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Armide (Gluck)
''Armide'' is an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck, set to a libretto by Philippe Quinault. Gluck's fifth production for the Parisian stage and the composer's own favourite among his works, it was first performed on 23 September 1777 by the Académie Royale de Musique in the second Salle du Palais-Royal in Paris. Background and performance history Gluck set the same libretto Philippe Quinault had written for Lully in 1686, based on Torquato Tasso's ''Gerusalemme liberata'' (''Jerusalem Delivered''). Gluck seemed at ease in facing French traditions head-on when he composed ''Armide''. Lully and Quinault were the very founders of serious opera in France and ''Armide'' was generally recognized as their masterpiece, so it was a bold move on Gluck's part to write new music to Quinault's words. A similar attempt to write a new opera to the libretto of ''Thésée'' by Jean-Joseph de Mondonville in 1765 had ended in disaster, with audiences demanding it be replaced by Lully's original. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck (; 2 July 1714 – 15 November 1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them '' Orfeo ed Euridice'' and '' Alceste'', he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian '' opera seria'' had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using orchestral recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera. Future composers like Mozart, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner revered Gluck very highly. The strong influence of French opera encouraged Gluck to move to Paris in November 1773. Fusing the traditions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ariodante
''Ariodante'' ( HWV 33) is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The anonymous Italian libretto was based on a work by Antonio Salvi, which in turn was adapted from Canti 4, 5 and 6 of Ludovico Ariosto's ''Orlando Furioso''. Each act contains opportunities for dance, originally composed for dancer Marie Sallé and her company. The opera was first performed in the Covent Garden Theatre, London, on 8 January 1735. ''Ariodante'' opened Handel's first season at Covent Garden and successfully competed against the rival Opera of the Nobility, supported by the Prince of Wales. Handel had the tacit and financial support of the King and Queen and, more vocally, of the Princess Royal. The opera received 11 performances during its premiere season at Covent Garden. Like Handel's other works in the ''opera seria'' genre, ''Ariodante'', despite its initial success, fell into oblivion for nearly two hundred years. An edition of the score was published in the early 1960s, from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riccardo Primo
''Riccardo primo, re d'Inghilterra'' ("Richard the First, King of England", HWV 23) is an opera seria in three acts written by George Frideric Handel for the Royal Academy of Music (1719) . The Italian-language libretto was by Paolo Antonio Rolli, after Francesco Briani's ''Isacio tiranno'', set by Antonio Lotti in 1710. Handel wrote the work for the Royal Academy's 1726–27 opera season, and also as homage to the newly crowned George II and the nation where Handel had just received citizenship.Dean, Winton, "Handel's ''Riccardo Primo''" (July 1964). ''The Musical Times'', 105 (1457): pp. 498–500. ''Riccardo Primo'' was the third opera Handel composed for the trio of famous star Italian singers, the castrato Senesino and the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. Performance history The opera received its premiere at the King's Theatre in London on 11 November 1727, and eleven subsequent performances. It was also performed in Hamburg and Braunschweig in Febru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amadigi
''Amadigi di Gaula'' ( HWV 11) is a "magic" opera in three acts, with music by George Frideric Handel. It was the fifth Italian opera that Handel wrote for an English theatre and the second he wrote for Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington in 1715. The opera about a damsel in distress is based on ''Amadis de Grèce'', a French tragédie-lyrique by André Cardinal Destouches and Antoine Houdar de la Motte. ''Amadigi'' was written for a small cast, employing four high voices. Handel made prominent use of wind instruments, so the score is unusually colorful, comparable to his ''Water Music''. The opera received its first performance in London at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket on 25 May 1715, in a lavish successful production. Charles Burney maintained near the end of the eighteenth century: Amadigi contained "...more invention, variety and good composition, than in any one of the musical dramas of Handel which I have yet carefully and critically examined".Richard B. Beams"H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teseo
''Teseo'' ("Theseus", HWV 9; ) is an opera seria with music by George Frideric Handel, the only Handel opera that is in five acts. The Italian-language libretto was by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Philippe Quinault's ''Thésée''. It was Handel's third London opera, intended to follow the success of ''Rinaldo'' after the unpopular ''Il pastor fido''. First performed on 10 January 1713,''Teseo'' featured "magical" effects such as flying dragons, transformation scenes and apparitions and had a cast of notable Italian opera singers. It was a success with London audiences, receiving thirteen performances even though the stage machinery for the "magical" effects broke down, and would have received more performances had not one of the theatre's managers run away with the box office receipts. Performance history The opera was premiered at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket on 10 January 1713. It received an additional 12 performances through 16 May 1713, a mark of success at thos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Handel
George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (; baptised , ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque composer well known for his operas, oratorios, anthems, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age. Handel started three commercial opera companies to supply the English nobility with Italian opera. In 1737, he had a physical break ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hippolyte Et Aricie
('' Hippolytus and Aricia'') was the first opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was premiered to great controversy by the Académie Royale de Musique at its theatre in the Palais-Royal in Paris on October 1, 1733. The French libretto, by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, is based on Racine's tragedy ''Phèdre''. The opera takes the traditional form of a with an allegorical prologue followed by five acts. Early audiences found little else conventional about the work. Background Rameau was almost 50 when he wrote ''Hippolyte et Aricie'' and there was little in his life to suggest he was about to embark on a major new career as an opera composer. He was famous for his works on music theory as well as books of harpsichord pieces. The closest he had come to writing dramatic music was composing a few secular cantatas and some popular pieces for the Paris fairs for his friend Alexis Piron. Yet Rameau's eagerness to write an opera is shown by a letter he wrote in October 1727 to Antoine Houd ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau (; – ) was a French composer and music theory, music theorist. Regarded as one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the 18th century, he replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer of his time for the harpsichord, alongside François Couperin. Little is known about Rameau's early years. It was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his ''Treatise on Harmony'' (1722) and also in the following years as a composer of masterpieces for the harpsichord, which circulated throughout Europe. He was almost 50 before he embarked on the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests today. His debut, ''Hippolyte et Aricie'' (1733), caused a great stir and was fiercely attacked by the supporters of Lully's style of music for its revolutionary use of harmony. Nevertheless, Rameau's pre-eminence in the field of French opera was soon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opéra National De Lyon
The Opéra National de Lyon, marketed as Opéra de Lyon during the last decade, is an opera company in Lyon, based and performing mostly at the Opéra Nouvel, an 1831 theater that was modernized and architecturally transformed in 1993. The inaugural performance of François-Adrien Boïeldieu's ''La Dame blanche'' was given on 1 July 1831. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries saw some significant French premieres of major operas including Richard Wagner's ''Die Meistersinger'' in 1896, Giordano's '' Andrea Chénier'' in the following year, and Moussorgsky's ''Boris Godunov'' in 1913. In addition, many world premieres such as Arnold Schoenberg's ''Erwartung'' (1967) have been presented. In the years after the 1969 appointment of Louis Erlo as general director, many innovative productions and premieres of both French operas and Twentieth Century operas have been staged. Two significant French artists who have been associated with the Opéra in recent years are the stage director ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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