Lalande: Suites pour les soupers du Roy

Suites pour les Soupers du Roy reconstructs, in sound, the music Louis XIV’s household heard behind the scenes of court life — not the formal Grand Couvert itself, but an imagined rehearsal at composer Michel-Richard de Lalande’s own home as he prepares his latest suites for the royal supper. As surintendant de la musique de la chambre from 1689, Lalande drew these “Symphonies” from a constantly reworked body of court entertainments — ballets, operas, and dances composed for both Louis XIV and the young Louis XV — reassembling them endlessly according to changing taste and ceremony rather than fixing them as a closed cycle. The freer, more experimental “Caprices” stand apart from this borrowed material, including the virtuosic Third Caprice, heard here in a newly reconstructed five-part orchestration that reveals Lalande’s striking use of extended bassoon “récits” emerging from the orchestral texture like voices borrowed from opera or organ music.

True to the album’s conceit of catching the music in its unguarded, workshop state, the program is interspersed with spoken interludes — a wickedly candid letter from the Princess Palatine, sister-in-law of the Sun King, and a drinking song performed during the curtain call — framing Lalande’s orchestral invention within the irreverent, surprisingly human social world of Versailles behind the pomp.

Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet, conductor
Caroline Delume, Massimo Moscardo, Bruno Helstroffer & Marie Langlet, theorbo
Yoann Moulin, harpsichord
Orchestra 1: Solenne Guilbert (1st violin), Tiphaine Coquempot, violin; Tormod Dalen, cello; Luc Marchal & Xavier Miquel, oboe & flute; Nicolas André, bassoon
Orchestra 2: Augustin Lusson & Émilie Planche, violin; Nils de Dinechin, cello; Elsa Frank & Francesco Intrieri, oboe & flute; Jérémie Papasergio, bassoon
Jean-Philippe Desrousseaux, narrator