Jean Philippe Rameau: Le Grand Theatre de l’amour

Sabine Devieilhe, the young French lyric-coloratura soprano is a name to watch. Over the 2013-14 Paris season she will star in Delibes’ Lakmé at the Opéra Comique and make her debut at the Opéra as the dazzling Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte. She has been described as a singer “whose upper register, like her virtuosity, appears limitless, while her verbal sense and dramatic engagement are breathtaking”. Both her achievement and her potential were recognised at the 2013 Victoires de la Musique Classique, France’s equivalent of the Grammys, where she won the award in the category for ‘Révélation artiste lyrique’.

In 2012 she appeared at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, in Mozart’s La finta giardiniera, and triumphed as Lakmé in Montpellier. Her plans also include the Queen of the Night and Constance in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Opéra de Lyon, and, further in the future, Bellini’s La sonnambula (which she has already sung in concert), Adele in Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus and Nannetta in Verdi’s Falstaff.

Sabine Devieilhe studied cello and musicology and sang in the chorus of the Opéra de Rennes before she entered the Paris Conservatoire, where in 2011 she received First Prize. She has performed with a number of important ensembles, particularly in the field of historically informed performance; these include Les Musiciens du Louvre under Marc Minkowski, Pygmalion under Raphaël Pichon, Les Cris de Paris under Geoffroy Jourdain, L’Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing under Jean-Claude Malgoire and Les Ambassadeurs under Alexis Kossenko, with whom she has recorded this new album of Rameau.

Conductor and flautist Alexis Kossenko was born in Nice and the international line-up of musicians in Les Ambassadeurs is the realisation of a dream inspired by the eclectic Dresden Hofkapelle of Bach’s time: to bring together period instruments to perform a broad repertoire, ranging from Bach, Rameau and Handel through Mozart and Rossini to Stravinsky and Debussy.

While the operatic music of Handel and his Italian contemporaries is now very much in vogue, French Baroque opera – which favours dramatic recitative, high tenors (rather than countertenors), subtler virtuosity and integrated ballets – remains less widely exposed. This Rameau collection features numbers from operas such as Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Indes Galantes, Les Boréades, Pygmalion, Les Paladins, Naïs, Anacréon, Zoroastre, Zaïs, Dardanus, Castor et Pollux and Platée. Joining Sabine Devieilhe, Alexis Kossenko and Les Ambassadeurs are other young singers: the French baritone Florian Sempey, the British tenor Samuel Boden and Le Jeune Chœur de Paris.