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Debut CD Recording: The Tastes Reunited
Les Délices successfully completed recording sessions for our first CD - a program of works by Couperin, Chauvon, Clérambault and others - in July 2008. We are thrilled to have lutenist Lucas Harris join us for this project. Stay tuned for updates, or email us if you would like to pre-order your own copy of the disc! We expect to release the recording in the fall of '08.

Fiscal Sponsorship through Fractured Atlas
Fractured Atlas, an organization that supports artists and musicians, has offered Les Délices fiscal sponsorship status, which allows us to accept tax-deductable donations to support the production of our début CD. Click here to learn more about how you can support Les Délices.

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• Feb. '08 Review (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• Feb. '08 Preview: Les Délices (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Early-music ensemble Les Délices serves up some delicious Baroque treats

Cleveland Plain Dealer
February 19, 2008
Donald Rosenberg

Les Délices, a Cleveland-based early-music group, devotes itself to French Baroque repertoire, including pieces Louis XIV had a hand in commissioning. The ensemble's concert Monda for the Rocky River Chamber Music Society at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church focused on a handful of these delights.

Many of the composers on the program were the cream of the day. The celebrated names were Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin, but they had equals in musical imagination in Marin Marais, Jean-Henry d'Anglebert, Pierre Danican Philidor, and Bénigne de Bacilly.

To each of these composers' works, les Délices applied rhythmic buyoancy, suave phrasing and seamless interplay. The group's founder, Debra Nagy, is a baroque oboist of consummate taste and expressivity, with a timbre of mellow woodsiness that eplores worlds of nuance.

Nagy was a motiatin presence in every work she touched. Lully's Sonata in C major from "Trios pour a coucher du Roy" found her trading phrases deftly with baroque violinist Scott Metcalfe. Their dialogues with viola da gamba player Emily Walhout and harpsichordist Lisa Goode Crawford were compelling.

Philidor, an oboist when not composing, wrote many scores for transverse flute that oboists have appropriated. His Cinquième Suite gives the oboe ample opportunity to weave florid and invigorating material with viola da gamba and harpsichord.

Crawford's artistry at the keyboard was a model of balance in ensemble workds and charismatic in a solo piece, d'Anglebert's Tombeau de M. de Chambonnieres, an elegy for the composer's teacher. The harpsichordist exulted in the trills and ornamental figures, even as she maintained a sure sense of line.

Marais' Suite in G major for viola da gamba and harpsichord brought Walhout to the fore. Her playing gave mellifluous voice to the dance pieces, as well as earthy appeal to the final hunting minuet, along with swagging harpsichord. In the composer's Suite in G minor, the full ensemble set each movement in energized or yearning motion.

Nagy and Metcalfe relished the unison lines between oboe and violin in Couperin's Deuxième Suite from "Concerts Royaux," which contains descriptive contrasts of dynamics in the final "Echos" movement.

Louis XIV also hadsingers at his command, though instrumentalists found their music so alluring that they tweaked them fro wordless treatment. Even without texts to tell the story, Les Délices probed te emotional contours of three de Bacilly songs in fine arrangements by Nagy. The results were delicious.

Debra Nagy and Les Délices to perform three Baroque Concerts

February 15, 2008
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Donald Rosenberg

In the skirmish between the Baroque and the modern, the distant past triumphed. Such is the saga of Debra Nagy, an oboist ho set out wiht a modern instrument but found her true calling on Baroque oboe.

Nagy's musical odyssey from New York and Oberlin to Belgium and Cleveland resulted in the creation of an early-music ensemble, Les Délices, which performs at three Northeast Ohio locations Saturday through Monday.

Nagy, 29, founded the group two years ago with colleagues from near and far. She met Baroque violinist Scott Metcalfe and viola da gamba player Emily Walhout, his wife, in the Trinity Consort in Portland, Ore. Harpsichordist Lisa Goode Crawford is a retired faculty member from the Oberlin Conservatory, where Nagy received a master's degree in historical performance.

The ensemble's raison d'etre, French Baroque music, stems from Nagy's Oberlin studies with the late James Caldwell, an admired oboist who had made historic Baroque recordings in the 1960s. Nagy absorbed Caldwell's love of the French Baroque and affinity for the older instrument.

"It felt very natural to me," said Nagy, a native of White Plains, N.Y., who lives in Cleveland Heights. "It's an extremely expressive instrument that gives you a lot of flexibility. I'd always considered myself a chamber musician. I don't want to make it sound like I knew what I was going to do professionally, but it was very attractive to me and exciting to learn."

Nagy learned quickly. Even while pursuing bachelor's and master's degrees at Oberlin and a doctorate at Case Western Reserve University, she was on the road several weeks a month playing with Baroque ensembles around te country.

But Nagy, who perfoms often with Apollo's Fire and directs the Collegium Musicum at Case, wanted to form an ensemble based in Cleveland with colleagues equally enamored of French repertoire. Since Metcalfe and Walhout live in Boston and Crawford spends half of the year in Paris, getting together would prove a challenge.

Nagy persevered, and Les Délices played its first concert in February 2006. The group joins forces twice a year for performances. The musicians hope to present three series next year.

The ensemble's name is a reflection of the music Nagy and company perform. "I wanted something to express the nature of the repertoire," she said, "which is both delicate and a delicacy."

This weekend's program, "In the Apartments of the King," is a potpurri of pieces that Louis XIV heard in his intimate quarters at Versailles. Les Délices will perform music by Lully, D'Anglebert, Philidor (the king's oboist, mais bien sur), Marais, Couperin, de Bacilly, and others.