If you’ve ever doubted that it is indeed good to be the king,
consider Louis XIV of France, whose job perks included a staff of 30 to 100
musicians who followed him everywhere he went in the course of a day. And I do
mean everywhere: Louis’s arising, dressing, promenading and doing of other
kingly stuff, dining, relaxing, and going to sleep were all accompanied by a
royal soundtrack, played live.
All that music (and we’re not counting opera and ballet
performances and church music, which were also plentiful) had a motive beyond
entertainment. Louis was determined to show that France’s supremacy and
superiority were reflected in its art, and to impress visiting dignitaries with
the money he was willing to spend on music and musicians, even when the country
was at war.
Louis’s roster of composers was an impressive one, with
Jean-Baptiste Lully absolutely at the top of the tree, whose branches included
such great 17th-century French names as Nicolas Clérambault, Michel Delalande,
Francois Couperin, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and Marin Marais. They are heard
today, but they’re mostly remembered for one or two “Baroque Greatest Hits”
favorites, which represent the very tip of a huge iceberg.
Even with its political inferences gone, this music still
makes absolutely delicious listening, as Pegasus Early Music demonstrated on
Sunday afternoon in its latest concert, “The Sun King.” The selections followed
a typical day for the Sun King, from sunup to sunset.
Louis XIV received that nickname, by the way, because of his
performance as Apollo in a royal court ballet. He was an enthusiastic and
accomplished dancer, so besides the many ballets and dances made to entertain him,
dance rhythms — minuets, bourées, and so on — frequently occur in the chamber
and vocal music written for him. In this concert, we even got a graceful sample
of baroque dancing from historical dancer Peggy Murray, which fit in perfectly.
This music calls for a particular kind of refinement — a
calmness and imperturbability, a sense of perfectly balanced sound, a relaxed
charm, which we like to think of as “French.”In this case the sound was enhanced by the gentle glow of period
instruments, particularly the wooden transverse flute — less brilliant than a
modern instrument, but in the hands of a flutist like Steven Zohn, it is
uniquely appealing. Add the soft-grained but still penetrating sounds of
gut-stringed instruments (violinist Vita Wallace and viola da gamba player Lisa
Terry), plus harpsichord (Michael Beattie), theorbo, and guitar (Pegasus
artistic director Deborah Fox), and you have a small but versatile ensemble
with a myriad of beguiling tone colors.
Wallace gave an engaging account of a substantial violin
sonata by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (a favorite of Louis’s), and Terry and
Fox were an ideal duet in three “Pieces de Viole” by Marais (actually a trio,
with dancing by Peggy Murray). The full group was displayed in a suite by
Michel de la Barre, and even more in Francois Couperin’s second “Concert
Royal,” a magnificent piece of chamber music, even if it was written as
background music.
And when you add Laura Heimes, the Pegasus “house soprano,”
you have something pretty heavenly. French baroque vocal music is very much
“about the words” and seldom calls for vocal virtuosity in the
trills-and-thrills sense, unlike Handel or Vivaldi. But it would be hard to
imagine a purer or more appropriate sound than Heimes’s for this repertory. She
delivered several dance-like, almost pop songs with great intimacy and charm,
and provided the requisite drama and grandeur for Clérambault’s cantata
“Orphée.” This lovely work, almost a mini-opera, takes its departure from the
Orpheus myth, or most of it — doubtless mindful of Louis’s desire to keep
things sunny, the composer ignores the problematic part after Orpheus and
Eurydice leave Hades together, in favor of a happy ending. No matter, when the
music is so beautiful.
With such a huge output of music for the court of Louis XIV,
probably most of it is not all that interesting, but the best works by all of
these composers (and there are plenty) are gems, and Pegasus chose an
enchanting selection for its program. Now, if next time they could only
recreate one of Louis’s famed outdoor equestrian ballets …
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2016.
