Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Destouches: Semiramis

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This Sunday's programming continues a long-ongoing broadcasting project of mine: to bring before the listening public the rediscovered glories of the lyric theater music of the French Baroque. I have presented recordings of all of the tragédies en musique of the founder of French opera in the seventeenth century, Jean Baptiste Lully and many of the operas of Jean Philippe Rameau, the greatest French musicmaster of the eighteenth century. The traditions of French Baroque opera stretch out over a period of nigh on a hundred years from circa 1670 to around 1770. Thereafter the distinctly Gallic Baroque style finally passed out of fashion upon the arrival of Gluck in Paris. There was a succession of French composers who "improved" upon the Lullian model: André Campra, for instance, and André Cardinal Destouches (1672-1749).

Like the ancient Greek legend of Orpheus and Euridice, the equally ancient Babylonian story about Queen Semiramis has been taken up by so many opera librettists and composers. Destouches took up one variant of her story for his last and finest opera, produced in 1718 at the Académie Royale de Musique. The Destouches Semiramis has been resurrected by the players of the ensemble Les Ombres, jointly directed by Margaux Blanchard and Silvain Sartre. Semiramis was recorded in 2020 in the splendid baroque opera theater of the royal palace of Versailles under the auspices of Chateau Versailles Spectacles. The Chorus of the Concert Spirituel (dir. Hervé Niquet) participated in this world premiere recording, released in 2021 on CD through the Chateau de Versailles label in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the building of the Opéra Royal.