The Tastes Reunited
Les Delices

Out of towners know about Cleveland’s Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, but

perhaps few realize that Cleveland is also a hotbed of classical baroque music. Les Délices, the latest baroque music ensemble to call Cleveland home, joins Apollo’s Fire and others to present music that was once just as cutting edge as rock was “in the day.”

Deborah Nagy, director, describes Les Délices as the “only group in the U. S. specializing in historically-informed performances of French Baroque chamber music.” As Nagy explains, during the time of Louis XIV the French court was virulently anti-Italian so composers had to disguise the source of their musical inspiration [Italian baroque] and/or write under assumed names. Les Délices’ first CD, The Tastes Reunited, offers trio sonatas from Francois Couperin and Louis-Nicolas Clérambault as well as a suite for oboe and basso coninuo by Francois Chauvon, solo oboe suites by Pierre Danican Philidor and Louis-Antoine Dornel, and solos for baroque guitar and theorbo by Francesco Corbetta and Robert de Visée.

The ensemble plays on instruments fashioned by modern craftsmen, but made as like the original instruments as possible. For a listener used to modern sounds, the guitar and theorbo selections as played [beautifully] by Lucas Harris have a sonic advantage because those instruments seem to have been modified less over the centuries than the others, such as the harpsichord (played with verve by Lisa Goode Crawford) which turned into the piano. Instrumentalists Nagy (oboe), Scott Metcalfe (violinist), and Emily Walhout (viola da gamba) join Harris and Goode to produce a vivid and lively recreation of a brilliant era.

Les Délices plays works by Marin Marais in concert at 8PM at the William Busta Gallery, 2731 Prospect Ave., Cleveland, on Sat 10/10 with a repeat the next day at the Music from the Western Reserve Series at 5PM on Sun 10/11.

Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.

Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.

(:divend:)