Music and Music-making in Laborde’s Choix de chansons

Jean-Benjamin de Laborde’s lavish four-volume Choix de chansons (1773), dedicated to Marie Antoinette, brought together music, poetry and engraved images in what Laborde described as an entirely new genre of chansons pittoresques. This paper examines the collection through the lens of performance and eighteenth-century sensibilité. Although the chanson was valued as a natural, artless and intimate form of musical expression, Laborde’s publication presents performers with considerable practical and expressive challenges: wide vocal ranges, complex strophic settings, difficult text underlay, and the need to reconcile technical preparation with an appearance of spontaneity. I argue that this tension between labour and apparent naturalness lies at the heart of the collection’s aesthetic. Its images, written-out accompaniments and other notational strategies do more than embellish the songs: they guide performers in imagining, embodying and communicating the shifting emotional states of the texts. The Choix de chansons thus offers a distinctive window onto the relationship between performance, sociability and sensibilité in late eighteenth-century France.

Erin Helyard is an acclaimed conductor and a virtuosic, expressive performer of the harpsichord and fortepiano. Erin graduated in harpsichord performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with first-class honours and the University Medal. He completed his Master's in fortepiano performance and a PhD in musicology with Tom Beghin at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal. His monograph Clementi and the woman at the piano: virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London was published by Oxford University Studies in Enlightenment in 2022.

As Artistic Director and co-founder of the celebrated Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes (Sydney) he has forged new standards of excellence in operatic performance in Australia. The company won Best Rediscovered Opera (2019) for Hasse’s Artaserse at the International Opera Awards in London. Pinchgut’s opera film, A Delicate Fire, won Best Australian Feature Film at the Sydney Women’s International Film Festival in 2021. Operas under his direction have been awarded Best Opera at the Helpmann Awards for three consecutive years (2015-2017), and he has received two Helpmann Awards for Best Musical Direction: one for a fêted revival of Saul (Adelaide Festival) in 2017 and the other for Hasse’s Artaserse (Pinchgut Opera) in 2019. Together with Richard Tognetti, Erin won an ARIA and an AIR award for Best Classical Album in 2020.

From 2006 to 2012, he was a central member of the award-winning Ensemble Caprice in Montreal. Since returning to Australia in 2014, he has collaborated with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva, and the Australian String Quartet. Erin has distinguished himself as a conductor in dynamic performances with the Sydney, Adelaide, Tasmanian, and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, Opera Australia, ACO Collective, the Australian National Academy of Music, and the Australian Haydn Ensemble. As a duo partner, he has performed and recorded with Avi Avital, Melissa Farrow, David Greco, Stephanie McCallum, James Morley, and Richard Tognetti. In 2018, he was recognised with a Music and Opera Singers Trust Achievement Award (MAA) for contribution to the arts in Australia. In 2022, Erin was an Artist in Residence at the Melbourne Recital Centre and in 2024 was Artist in Residence with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In 2023, he was named Limelight’s Critics’ Choice Australian Artist of the Year.

Erin is an Associate Professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and appears courtesy of Pinchgut Opera.