With Molière at the opera, Jérôme Correas and the Paladins ensemble show once again that they can successfully combine two things: their inimitable and admirable style of interpreting the baroque and the spoken-song technique that intensifies the colors and contrasts of the text of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s comedies-ballets. The "two Baptists" (Lully and Molière!) created one of the liveliest theatrical and musical collaborations in history, founded on the mixing of melodies and diction, of dance and action, a collaboration further stimulated by a thirst for glory.

Their collaboration began in 1661 and lasted about a decade. Although Molière never expressly wrote an opera libretto for Lully, the dramaturgist clearly inspired the composer (who was ten years his senior), as seen in Lully’s invention of the tragédie lyrique in a process described by Elizabeth Guiliani in the essay included in the liner notes.

This new recording offers up an overview of Lully and Charpentier’s comédies-ballets with Molière’s texts, including many pages from The Bourgeois Gentleman. It then transitions from Monsieur de Pourceaugnac’s humour to the tragic notes of Psyché’s arias, without neglecting the grotesque trio from Charpentier’s Mariage forcé. The versatile vocal quartet, formed by Luanda Siqueira, Jean-François Lombard, Jérôme Billy, and Virgile Ancely, led by Jérôme Correas’s refined guidance, breathes new life into Lully and Molière’s characters.