French Cantatas: The Theatre of the Salon December 2023

The Opera Company, Saraband, Heath Street Baptist Church

As part of a continued exploration of Rameau and other French Baroque composers, this innovative show (a follow up to the critically acclaimed Rameau’s Roots) explores the beautiful cantata repertoire being performed in French salons at the beginning of the 18th century, which provided a training ground for composers to try out dramatic scenes before making full scale operas for the public opera houses. Though intended originally as concert works, we decided to stage these miniature masterpieces for the first time, splitting up the solo vocal role amongst several singers to create dramatic and comic scenarios.

Rameau composed several cantatas before writing his first opera, and other composers we hardly hear or know of today, like Montéclair, Lefebvre, Courbois, Clérambault, produced volumes of them. They were inspired by the flow of new music and drama from Italy and the rediscovery and obsession with the Ancients and the art of gesture and rhetoric. The salon, with its discerning audiences, was a perfect place to experiment and be free of populist or royal constraints.

Including several UK premieres, and some music not heard in 300 years. Devised by director Guido Martin-Brandis and violinist Sarah Bealby-Wright. Production photos by Bonnie Britain

*** To find out more, read the programme notes and synopses here ***

Hilary Cronin - Cupid/Conscience/Mourner

Emily Gray - Lucretia/Amaryllis

Samuel Boden - Mirtis/Orpheus

Saraband - Ensemble

Reviews

Opera Now, Robert Thicknesse

★★★★★

“The day after Covent Garden’s joyless Jephtha, I got one of those nice reminders about why this whole thing is worth the candle – and, as usual, from a tiny company in an out-of-the-way place. The show was called The Theatre of the Salon; the pieces mini chamber-operas from the French baroque. Saraband is a little group led by Sarah Bealby-Wright, in love with music of the 17th and 18th centuries, and here they got back together with director Guido Martin Brandis after their beguiling “Rameau’s Roots” in the same venue I wrote about a couple of years ago.

We are still in those misty days of French baroque, between Lully and Rameau, and the world of these cantatas, three of which were minimally staged here, divided by instrumental jigs and dances. It was entirely magical, that bewitching freedom and fantasy and strangeness of French music, played and performed with palpable love, humour and huge enjoyment.    

And expertise. Michel Pignolet de Montéclair’s Morte di Lucretia was sung with scary intensity by Emily Gray, a versatile, powerful mezzo who is magnetic on stage and should be far better known. The piece is lovely, if pretty standard, but this performance (and that of Hilary Cronin as a supporting angel) took it to another place. Cronin – a baroque soprano of great warmth with a rocketing reputation – sang the sad Les regrets by Louis Antoine Lefebvre sensitively, and then the pair joined with tenor Samuel Boden for Rameau’s Le berger fidèle, where a the shepherd Mirtis talks Diana out of having his girlfriend killed (it’s not totally clear why she has to be, anyway). A tiny vignette, really, but done with unobtrusive grace, and eventually rather sexy. All this plus an all-together-now knees-up dance-tune, the singers providing the percussion on drum, tambourine and home-made farting machine (pétadou/rommelpot) with better timing than many professionals I've heard. Modest forces,  but great ambitions and a big, generous vision, producing an exhilaration out of all proportion to the means.”