Ensemble Amarillis & Stéphanie d' Oustrac - Médée furieuse (2011)

Medea, granddaughter of the Sun, queen and sorceress, falls prey to the green-eyed monster and bursts forth in rage when it becomes clear that Jason, he of Golden Fleece fame, is canoodling with pesky Hypsipile (at one time queen of an island of women with bad breath, but that's another story). Beginning with Francesco Cavalli in the middle of the seventeenth century, operatic composers began to explore the manifest possibilities of this situation, and French composers quickly followed the fascinating Italians in this respect. The locus classicus was Charpentier's Médée (1693), and it's a bit hard to understand why mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d'Oustrac did not include a selection or two from that opera as a reference point. Her program consists mostly of cantatas, but portions of one (at the time) well-known opera, Gianettini's Medea in Atene, are included. Probably the answer involves matters of scale; the works here are chamber pieces that partly depend on skillful interaction between the singer and a small accompanying ensemble. Medea's fury, if not tamped down, has to express itself in slightly subtler ways. The real star of the show here is the all-female French historical-instrument ensemble Amarillis, and especially its crack recorder player and Baroque oboist Héloïse Gaillard. Sample track 12, Gianettini's "Alati Corsieri," for an idea of her skills and of the ensemble's precise yet lively playing. D'Oustrac herself has a slightly swooping way of developing a tone that's distinctive but takes a little getting used to. She works with the ensemble rather than dominating it in the way these works require. In the virtuoso aria "Tirans des rivages funèbres" that ends track 20 she shows herself the equal of some hardcore Italianate passagework. The program is nicely broken up, including a short work by Jacques Duphly that depicts Medea's range in keyboard form, and several of the other works also feature interpolated keyboard pieces by other composers. The Medea cantatas by Clérambault and Bernier recorded here are almost unknown, and indeed the whole field of the French cantata is underrepresented on recordings and probably represented a chance for composers to experiment with Italian styles in a way that they could not in grander opera. The disc is thus welcome for Baroque enthusiasts, and even for general listeners who will be interested to observe the slightly different perspectives from which this compelling female of Greek mythology is observed. ~ James Manheim