To mark the 250th anniversary of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s death, Ensemble Amarillis and tenor Mathias Vidal, leading performers in French baroque repertoire, recorded this Rameau chamber music programme performed earlier in 2014 at the Château de Versailles.

Although his output consists essentially of operas (Les Indes galantes, Hippolyte et Aricie, Platée, Les Boréades), Rameau, one of the greatest French composers of the 18th century, also left for posterity a number of works in a more intimate style, such as those featured on this recording: two cantatas and two of the Pièces de clavecin en concert, thus reflecting Amarillis’s constant concern to set vocal eloquence alongside instrumental discourse.

“We have chosen to play the fifth and the second concerts. They are given in two different scorings, which was customary in Rameau’s day and in the decades that followed, since several versions of this music coexist (for sextet, for orchestra, for solo harpsichord)...Finally, our preference in these cantatas for the voice of Mathias Vidal, with its timbre at once powerful and mellow, rather than a soprano voice, reflects our wish to restore all their liveliness and their vivacity to these miniature dramas and is logically consistent with the characters they depict, the musician Orpheus and the shepherd Myrtil.” Héloïse Gaillard