OPERA LAFAYETTE CHORUS
Opera Lafayette
In 1994 the Artistic Director Ryan Brown founded The Violins of Lafayette, a Washington DC-based period instrument ensemble dedicated to the great wealth of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In its opening season, VOL produced a series of chamber concerts in the Salon Doré, an eighteenth-century drawing-room in the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the following seasons the ensemble grew to produce larger works such as Rebel’s Les Eléments and concerti grossi of Handel and Corelli. Collaborations resulted in performances of the complete Brandenburg Concertos of Bach with Dumbarton Concerts as well as a programme of Purcell’s theatrical music with texts by Congreve, Shakespeare, and Dryden with the Olney Theatre. VOL also produced a programme of sacred music by Schmelzer and Biber in collaboration with the Choir of St Ignatius Loyola in New York and at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, and an orchestral concert of works by Rameau, J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Gluck at the Embassy of France. As part of its artistic development, The Violins of Lafayette has given particular attention to performances of opera, both semi-staged and in concert. In 1998 VOL produced Charpentier’s Actéon, and in 1999, in the statuary hall of the Corcoran Gallery, Rameau’s Pygmalion. This performance featured both the tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt and dancerchoreographer Catherine Turocy, and the critical response to the quality and individuality of the opera was exceptional. Subsequently VOL invited both artists, along with the NY Baroque Dance Company and many other distinguished singers to collaborate with the ensemble on Lully’s opera-ballet Acis et Galatée, an event that won critical praise. In the same year VOL complemented this production with Handel’s Acis and Galatea in collaboration with The Four Nations Ensemble. In 2001, encouraged by its success in presenting opera and recognizing an opportunity to present this literature on both coasts, The Violins of Lafayette and The Redwoods Festival, a summer festival in Sonoma County, California, joined as one organization called Opera Lafayette. In its first season Opera Lafayette and guests from Le Neon Theatre produced a programme that included scenes from Charpentier and Molière’s comedy Le malade imaginaire. In early 2002 Opera Lafayette produced the 1774 Paris version of Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice in collaboration with the new Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Maryland. Opera Lafayette’s début recording is of this version of Gluck’s masterpiece. In 2003 Opera Lafayette produced Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, again to high praise, and in 2004, Haydn’s Il mondo della luna, with staging by Leon Major and featuring François Loup, also to great critical acclaim.
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