L. N. Clérambault: Medée Cantata for soprano & instruments Pascale Beaudin & Four Nations Ensemble.

Medée: Cantata for voice & Instruments
L. N. Clérambault
Pascale Beaudin soprano
Chloe Fedor, violin
David Ross, flute
Keiran Campbell, cello
Scott Pauley, theorbo
Andrew Appel, harpsichord
David Walters, recording Engineer.
Recorded in live performance, May 4th, 2023
Church of the Heavenly Rest, New York City

In a society shielded from overbearing passions, Medea is the most threatening of villains. The court relies on the participants’ ability to control and camouflage anger, despair, joy and need. Medea, who invades operas of Lully and Charpentier and in this, Clérambault’s most exciting cantata, is Versailles’ nightmare. She rocks boats, stamps in the garden, and ultimately burns down the palace.

Clérambault published volumes of Cantates Françoises. Inspired by the passionate chamber cantatas coming from Italy, he adopted this form of miniature opera while transforming the works to support French language and classical ideals with roots in Racine and Corneille. Musical soliloquies are kin to moments from Phedre or Berenice. Incantations (so often to demons below) are extended and distorted. Laments are in the form of ancient airs de cours and explosions of fury adopt the Italian da capo aria found throughout Alessandro Scarlatti’s cantatas. Yet Clérambault is rarely literal in his adoption of Italian models and alters the structure of his arias to keep them novel and spontaneous.

Though his cantatas were printed as chamber works, many of them were expanded to be performed at Les Concerts Spirituel, Paris’ first public concert series. In this way, Clérambault, the favorite composer of Madame de Maintenon, bridged a gap between the courtly salon and the public stage at a time when music was migrating. The old guilt ridden King and his dull wife asked Clérambault to abandon mythologies for biblical stories and placed the composer in charge of the musical education of girls at the school of St. Cyr. Yet the public wanted the colorful exhibitionism of Leclair, the novelty of the cello, and the fire and fury of Medea.