Founded in Lyon in 2009, Correspondances brings together under the direction of the harpsichordist and organist Sébastien Daucé a group of singers and instrumentalists, all of whom are specialists in the music of the Grand Siècle. In a few short years of existence, Correspondances has become a benchmark ensemble in the seventeenth-century French repertory. Placing itself under the auspices of Baudelaire’s notion of correspondences between the arts, it performs music whose sonorities can still directly touch today’s listeners while presenting staged productions of rarer and more original forms such as the oratorio and the ballet de cour.
The exceptional reconstruction of the score of Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit, the result of three years of research, allowed modern audiences to discover a major musical event of the seventeenth century, the unprecedented moment that inaugurated the reign of the Sun King. After the public and critical success of the CD-book released on harmonia mundi (Le Concert Royal de la Nuit, 2015), the ensemble returned to this extraordinary spectacle in 2017 with the théâtre de Caen, in a contemporary production by Francesca Lattuada combining elements of the circus and the dance, also given at the Opéra Royal de Versailles and at the Opéra de Dijon. This staged version has been published recently: an exceptional box set gathering the full music (27 additional dances) and the recording of the show.