I’ve been hearing a lot about Patricia Petibon for some time, so when I found myself in a bookshop recently, with a book voucher and Patricia Petibon’s CD “Nouveau Monde”, purporting to be Baroque arias and songs themed around voyages to new lands, I decided to give it a try.

This was the first track on the CD.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sniJaV48gQ&hl=en_US&version=3&rel=0]

I love this.  It starts out sounding like your normal, well-behaved sort of baroque aria, and you listen along politely, perhaps reading the lyrics, which compare love to a sudden tempest in one’s previously tranquil life (Björk might agree with this idea), and then all of a sudden, there she goes, up into the stratosphere, and just stays there, showing off with mad octave leaps all over the place, and every note clear and sweet as a bell.  I especially like the very end section where she goes sirening up and down, making me giggle, before going up and up and up, absolutely perfectly, to the very end.

Lyrics are below:

And that’s just the start of the CD.  The whole thing is magical beyond belief and definitely not your standard baroque compilation.  Composers include Handel, Purcell, Rameu, Charpentier and Le Bailly, and very baroque pieces are interspersed with more Renaissaince-sounding material and South American folk songs like Tonada La Lata.  I particularly enjoyed, Yo soy la locura (I am madness),  by Le Bailly (sung here by Montserrat Figueras), and J’ai vu le loup (I saw the wolf), a traditional piece (sung here by I’m not sure who, I’m afraid!).  But it’s all amazing and worth a listen.

Nothing really compares to those mad sirens at the start, though.