Gramophone Editor's Choices - December 2020

Katherine Watson (Zéphire), Katia Velletaz (Un Habitant de Cythère/Hylas/Lucile/Dircé), Chantal Santon-Jeffery (L'Amour), Judith van Wanroij (Daphné), Éléonore Pancrazi (Béroé/La Prêtresse de l'Amour/Julie), Thomas Dolié (Thersande/Adherbal/Un Devin/Ovide)
Orfeo Orchestra, Purcell Choir
György Vashegyi

Gyorgy Vashegyi, his Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir offer up a recording of Boismortier's Les Voyages de l'Amour of which this 1736 opera-ballet has been in sore need, a score long and unjustly neglected. For this latest dramatic extravaganza on Glossa, Chantal Santon Jeffery takes on the title role of lovesick Cupid, and the soprano is joined by two further widely experienced stars of the French Baroque opera revival in Katherine Watson (as the god of love's sidekick and factotum Zephire) and Judith van Wanroij as the shepherdess Daphne, smartly resistant to the god's charms (until the end of the fourth act). By 1736, Joseph Bodin de Boismortier had become well-known in Parisian musical circles for his entertaining instrumental and vocal music and in his booklet essay Benoit Dratwicki (of the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles) explains how this fashionable composer came to have his first production for the Paris Opera cast into the shadows, how the roles for Cupid and Zephire may have originally been written for two prominent dessus of the time but were replaced by male singers for the premiere and how this new recorded edition aims to provide a performance as the composer would have wanted it. Katia Velletaz, Eleonore Pancrazi and Thomas Dolie also contribute to this lively entertainment, with this release also containing two differing versions of the second act about the arrow-firing god of love's travels through village, city and court in search of true love for himself.

"Among the series of tiny vignettes – airs, duets, dances and choruses – there is plenty to beguile. Using a wide palette of instrumental colours, including a hurdygurdy, Boismortier has a delicate sense of the picturesque...That avid explorer of French operatic rarities, György Vashegyi, directs his Hungarian forces with his usual zest (the pacing of the dialogues seems spot on) and feeling for colour." - Gramophone Magazine, December 2020.