Soprano Sandrine Piau's new project is dedicated to French baroque repertoire, offering a wide range of very beautiful arias by Rameau, Lully, Campra etc in a 100-year journey that mixes very famous music with little-know pieces, such as arias by Grétry or Sacchini > Sandrine Piau and Jérôme Correas, a former singer, founder and music director of Les Paladins, have worked together on a regular basis since their early careers, especially with William Christie.

Sandrine Piau and Véronique Gens have a longstanding rapport and dreamed of making a recording together. Here they pay tribute to two singers who, like them, were born within a year of each other, Mme Dugazon (1755-1821) and Mme Saint-Huberty (1756-1812): both enjoyed triumphant careers in Paris, inspiring numerous librettists and composers. Gluck even nicknamed Saint-Huberty ‘Madamela- Ressource’, while ‘a Dugazon’ became a generic name for the roles of naïve girls in love, and later of comical mothers. Rivals? They very likely were, given the quarrelsome spirit of the operatic world of the time, even if they never crossed paths on stage.

For the staging of Odipe à Colone Antonio Sacchini could count on the support of Marie Antoinette Queen of France, who wanted to inaugurate, with this opera, the new theatre of Versailles on 4th January 1786. Due to inadequate machinery and some poor performances, however, success was not what had been expected. To console Sacchini of the near-failure, the Queen promised him to have Odipe repeated under better circumstances in the autumn, at Fontainebleau with the company of the Opéra, but the terrible events of the necklace affair made her too vulnerable to impose her choice. Already gravely ill, the composer took the news very badly: he died a few days later, in the night of October 8th, 1786. The première of Odipe à Colone took place on 1st February 1787 at Paris’s Opéra, in front of a full house. It was a triumph. Odipe à Colone kept reaping exceptional success up until 1844, reaching almost 600 performances and enthusing renowned composers such as Piccini and Berlioz.

Antonio Sacchini was one of the leading composers of Italian opera seria of the late 18th century. Oedipe à Colone, his last work, was extraordinarily successful, with regular performances at the Paris Opéra between 1787 and 1844. Based on Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, the second item in a trilogy that is one of the glories of Greek literature, Sacchini’s opera is notable for both its high drama and tender, moving lyricism. It was championed by Berlioz who considered it to be an inspired and even sublime work.

The Haydn series continues with the Paris Symphony no 87. Julien Chauvin and his orchestra keep shaking us up with historical instruments listening Haydn’s works and several other forgotten scores from the same period. All of them were commissioned for the Concert de la Loge Olympique - ancestor and model for Julien Chauvin and his musicians - and all of them sank into oblivion during the 19th century, except for Haydn’s symphonies. The release offers an opportunity to experience some rare works of Grétry, Lemoyne and Ragué and to revive the success that they once knew.