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Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants & La Descente d'Orphée aux enfers
Venetian Theater
Tickets from $60

Following the magical performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Caramoor in 2024, pioneering conductor and harpsichordist William Christie returns to present the work that gave his renowned Baroque ensemble its name: Les Arts Florissants. In this double bill, two miniature operatic gems by Marc-Antoine Charpentier shimmer with expressive choruses, eloquent declamation, courtly airs, and vibrant instrumental colors, revealing the French composer’s dramatic genius. The performance features soloists from Le Jardin des Voix, the ensemble’s international academy for young singers.
Les Arts Florissants
William Christie, Music Director
Singers from Les Jardin des Voix
Marie Lambert and Stéphane Facco, stage direction
Choreography by Martin Chaix
CHARPENTIER: Les Arts Florissants
CHARPENTIER: La Descente d'Orphée aux enfers
To close its 80th anniversary season, William Christie has chosen a symbolic gesture: to share with the public, for the first time since the 1980s, Marc-Antoine Charpentier's short opera that gave its name to the ensemble… Les Arts Florissants. Presented as a double bill with another operatic work by the same composer, La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus' Descent into the Underworld), this new performance will also offer the opportunity to discover the voices of the ten new laureates of Le Jardin des Voix (The Garden of Voices), Les Arts Florissants' international academy for young singers. A truly triumphant finale!
Les Arts Florissants and Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers are part of the "origin story" of Les Arts Florissants, which performed them from their very first concerts. True gems of theatrical music, these pocket operas have been—and still are—remarkably rich testing grounds for experimentation. It contains all the ingredients of Baroque vocal art: choruses in the style of the Roman school, eloquent declamatory solos, arias reminiscent of courtly airs… as well as echoes of Lully’s comedies and tragedies, with typical overtures and lively, colorful instrumental pieces. These two masterpieces consecrate Charpentier’s dramatic genius, whose impact on audiences to this day remains living proof.
To bring them to life, this new production will utilize all the energy and talent of the ten new laureates of the Jardin des Voix academy. These young singers, selected from around the world by William Christie and Paul Agnew, will perform together for the first time with the musicians of Les Arts Florissants and immerse themselves in the ensemble’s core repertoire: French music of the Grand Siècle.
A celebration of the arts, in which directors Marie Lambert-Le Bilhan and Stéphane Facco, along with choreographer Martin Chaix and his dancers, will participate to reveal its full flavor and emotion!
About the Artists
An ensemble of singers and instrumentalists specialized in the performance of Baroque music on period instruments, Les Arts Florissants are renowned the world over. Founded in 1979 by the Franco-American harpsichordist and conductor William Christie, the Ensemble, named for a short opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, has played a pioneering role in the revival of a Baroque repertoire that had long been neglected (including the rediscovery of countless treasures in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). Today that repertoire is widely performed and admired: not only French music from the reign of Louis XIV, but also more generally European music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Since 2007, the Ensemble is also conducted by the British tenor Paul Agnew, who is appointed Musical Codirector of Les Arts Florissants in 2019.
Each season Les Arts Florissants give around 100 concerts and opera performances in France—at the Philharmonie de Paris, where they are artists in residence, the Paris Opéra-Comique, the Paris National Opera, the Château de Versailles, as well as at numerous festivals—and are an active ambassador for French culture abroad, being regularly invited to New York, London, Edinburgh, Brussels, Vienna, Salzburg, Madrid, Barcelona, Moscow, and elsewhere.
Since the 1987 production of Lully’s Atys at the Opéra Comique in Paris, which was triumphantly revived in May 2011, it has been on the opera stage that Les Arts Florissants have enjoyed their greatest successes. Notable productions include works by Rameau (Les Indes galantes, Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Boréades, Les Paladins, Platée), Lully and Charpentier (Médée, David et Jonathas, Les Arts florissants, Armide), Handel (Orlando, Acis and Galatea, Semele, Alcina, Serse, Hercules, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato), Purcell (King Arthur, Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy Queen), Mozart (The Magic Flute, Die Entführung aus dem Serail), Monteverdi (his opera trilogy), but also by composers who are less frequently played, such as Landi (Il Sant’Alessio), Cesti (Il Tito), Campra (Les Fêtes vénitiennes) and Hérold (Zampa).
For their theater productions, Les Arts Florissants have called on the talents of some of the greatest stage directors, including Jean-Marie Villégier, Robert Carsen, Adrian Noble, Andrei Serban, Luc Bondy, Deborah Warner, David McVicar, Claus Guth and Jérôme Deschamps and Macha Makeïeff, as well as on renowned choreographers such as Béatrice Massin, Ana Yepes, Jirí Kylián, Blanca Li, Trisha Brown, Robyn Orlin, José Montalvo, Françoise Denieau, Dominique Hervieu and Mourad Merzouki.
Les Arts Florissants enjoy an equally high profile in the concert hall, as illustrated by their many acclaimed concert or semi-staged performances of operas and oratorios (Rameau’s Zoroastre, Anacréon and Les Fêtes d’Hébé, Charpentier’s Actéon and La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, Campra’s Idoménée and Mozart’s Idomeneo, Montéclair’s Jephté, Rossi’s L’Orfeo and Handel’s Giulio Cesare as well as his Messiah, Theodora, Susanna, Jephtha and Belshazzar), their secular and sacred chamber-music programs (petits motets by Lully and Charpentier, madrigals by Monteverdi and Gesualdo, court airs by Lambert, hymns by Purcell, among others) and their approach to large-scale works (particularly the grands motets by Rameau, Mondonville, Campra and Charpentier, as well as Handel’s Messiah and J.S. Bach’s Matthew’s and John’s Passion).
The Ensemble has produced an impressive discography: nearly 100 recordings (CD and DVD) and its own collection in collaboration with harmonia mundi directed by William Christie and Paul Agnew.
In recent years, Les Arts Florissants have launched several education programs for young musicians. The most emblematic is the Academy of Le Jardin des Voix: created in 2002, it is held every two years and has already brought a substantial number of new singers into the limelight. The Arts Flo Juniors program, launched in 2007, enables conservatory students to join the orchestra and chorus for the length of a production, from the first day of rehearsals up to the final performance. And then there is the partnership between William Christie, Les Arts Florissants and New York's Juilliard School of Music, which since 2007 has allowed a fruitful artistic exchange between the U.S. and France. Launched in 2021, a yearly program of masterclasses in Thiré (Vendée, Pays de la Loire) comes to complete this panel of programs with short working sessions led by William Christie and Paul Agnew, to help young professionals improve their skills.
Les Arts Florissants also organize numerous events aimed at building new audiences. Linked to each year’s concert program, they are designed for both amateur musicians and non-musicians, adults as much as children.
In 2012, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants created the festival Dans les Jardins de William Christie, in partnership with the Conseil départemental de la Vendée. An annual event, the festival brings together artists from Les Arts Florissants, pupils from the Juilliard School and finalists from Le Jardin des Voix for concerts and promenades musicales in the gardens created by William Christie at Thiré, in the Vendée. In addition to the festival, Les Arts Florissants are working with the endowment fund Les Jardins de Musique de William Christie towards the creation of a permanent cultural venue in Thiré. In 2017, following a decision by the French Ministry of Culture, Les Arts Florissants and the endowment fund « Les Jardins de Musique de William Christie » have been awarded the national label « Centre culturel de Rencontre », which distinguishes projects associating creation, patrimony and transmission. In 2018, Les Arts Florissants become the Foundation Les Arts Florissants – William Christie.
Les Arts Florissants receives financial support from the State, the Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs (DRAC), the Département de la Vendée and the Région Pays de la Loire. The Selz Foundation is their Principal Sponsor. The American Friends of Les Arts Florissants are Major Sponsors. Les Arts Florissants have been artists in residence at the Philharmonie de Paris since 2015.
William Christie, harpsichordist, conductor, musicologist, and teacher, is the inspiration behind one of the most exciting musical adventures of the last 40 years. A pioneer in the rediscovery of Baroque music, he has introduced the repertoire of 17th- and 18th-century France to a very wide audience across the globe. Born in Buffalo, and educated at Harvard and Yale, William Christie has lived in France since 1971. The turning point in his career came in 1979, when he founded Les Arts Florissants.
As director of this vocal and instrumental ensemble, William Christie soon made his mark as both a musician and man of the theatre, in the concert hall and the opera house. Major public recognition came in 1987 with the production of Lully’s Atys at the Opéra Comique in Paris.
From Charpentier to Rameau, through Couperin, Mondonville, William Christie is the uncontested master of tragédie-lyrique as well as opéra-ballet, and is just as comfortable with the French motet as with music of the court. But his affection for French music does not preclude him from exploring other European repertoires as Monteverdi, Rossi, Scarlatti, Landi, Purcell, Handel, Mozart, Haydn or Bach.
Notable among his most recent operatic work are Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, Opéra Royal de Versailles and Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen on an international tour (La Scala in Milan, Luzern, Tanglewood Festival…), Charpentier’s Médée at the Opéra de Paris and Teatro Real in Madrid and Les Fêtes d’Hébé at Paris Opéra Comique.
As a guest conductor, William Christie often appears alongside the Berliner Philharmoniker or the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at opera festivals such as Glyndebourne or opera houses such as the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Zurich Opernhaus, or the Opéra National de Lyon.
His extensive discography includes more than 100 recordings. The most recent ones – « Conversations – Gaspard Le Roux : Suites pour deux clavecins », « Haydn – Paris Symphonies & Violin Concerto n°1 », « Nei giardini d’amore – Baroque arias for 2 alti » – were issued by harmonia mundi in the “Les Arts Florissants” collection.
Wishing to develop further his work as a teacher, in 2002 William Christie created Le Jardin des Voix, Les Arts Florissant’s biennial baroque Academy for young singers, now established at Thiré in Vendée. Since 2007 he has been artist in residence at the Juilliard School in New York, where he gives master classes twice a year. In 2021, he launches with Les Arts Florissants the first “Arts Flo Masterclasses” for young professional musicians at the Quartier des Artistes in Thiré (Vendée, Pays de la Loire – France).
In 2012, he created the Festival Dans les Jardins de William Christie in his own gardens, located in the French village of Thiré in the Vendée, where he welcomes every summer young musicians from the Juilliard School and singers of the Jardin des Voix along with the musicians and singers of Les Arts Florissants.
William Christie has bequeathed his real-estate assets to the Foundation Les Arts Florissants –William Christie created in 2018.
In November 2008, William Christie was elected to France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, and gave his official inaugural speech under the dome of the Institut de France in January 2010. In 2022 he was the recipient of the PdSK (German Record Critics’ Award) Honorary Award.
During the 2024-2025 season, an anniversary tour and a series of exceptional events marked the celebration of William Christie's 80th birthday.
Highlights of the 2025-26 season include a South American tour of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, Charpentier's Midnight Mass at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, Handel's Concerti grossi, Scarlatti's Messa di Santa Cecilia, an international tour of Les Arts florissants / La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers by Charpentier with the winners of the 12th edition of Le Jardin des Voix, as well as residencies at the Philharmonie du Luxembourg and in Madrid.

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Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra