Erbarme Dich

Description

Young tenor with a flourishing career, regular soloist with Les Arts Florissants, Reinoud Van Mechelen is invited by the greatest contemporary baroque conductors. He has decided to dedicate his first solo album to a composer he interprets with finesse and infectious joy: Johann Sebastian Bach. Erbarme dich evokes for music lovers the famous aria for alto from the St. Matthew Passion; but it is also the aria full of pain and sensuality for tenor and traverso from Cantata BWV 55. Indeed, a large corpus of cantatas composed by the cantor in Leipzig between 1724 and 1726 highlights a complicity between the tenor voice and the flute. Bach excels in this art of discourse and enjoys emphasizing or challenging the text by drawing with the flute lines full of heightened vocality. This art of intertwining voices has captivated Reinoud Van Mechelen and flutist Anna Besson, who, along with organist and harpsichordist Benjamin Alard, chose to articulate these arias around works by Bach for organ alone and traverso. This album marks the birth of the ensemble founded by Reinoud Van Mechelen, A Nocte Temporis ("Since the Dawn of Time"), and the beginning of his collaboration with Alpha, which will extend over several years.