Jean-Baptiste Lully met a rather sticky end. Quite literally, by his own conducting staff. Lully, it is remembered, loved to compose music that could be danced to. As many conductors did at this time, ...

Most music lovers know the tragicomic story of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s untimely demise. He was conducting a piece in his usual manner--by raising and lowering a long, pointed cane, which he occasionally ...

The "authentic revival" of early music acquires a new meaning here: this production by Jean-Marie Villégier was a landmark baroque staging back in 1987, but the sets and costumes were not kept. An ...

Simon Mundy attends a weekend of Baroque opera from the Italian-French composer, including a revival of Chateau de Versailles Spectacles’ new staging of ‘Atys’ ...

As part of Radio 3's Baroque Spring season, Lucie Skeaping introduces the first of two Early Music Shows this weekend dedicated to French Baroque music. Today, Lucie explores the relationship between ...

If you don’t know Debussy’s 1913 tennis-inspired ballet Jeux, then start here. Performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky in May 1913, it flopped, and had the bad luck to be ...

The opening section of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s 2012 String Quartet No. 4 is subtitled “light and airy”, and, aptly, the four strings produce extraordinary, airy sonorities: a sequence of ...

Stephen Johnson explores Lully's surviving religious works and finds a composer remarkably attuned to the opportunities and pitfalls of combining theatre and church in music. Show more They say that ...

The delightful scenario of L’Apothéose de Lully imagines the composer Lully, one of François Couperin’s forebears at the court of Louis XIV, being wafted up to Mount Parnassus by Apollo. There, he ...