The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra turns forty this year and is celebrating the occasion with this new recording.

They have been around in every age, those who put on airs and think themselves better than the rest of us. They have been depicted in countless plays, the best known of which is Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme.

Two musical versions are presented here, written almost 250 years apart, yet equally relevant in their time and ours. Lully and Strauss both revel in their love of telling stories: not with words, but with a wealth of tonal material, they tell the tale of Monsieur Jourdain, who aspires to rise from his middle-class (bourgeois) status to the ranks of the aristocracy, with all it entails. No one escapes in this satirical presentation, which ridicules everyone involved.

Strauss’s Der Bürger als Edelmann is directly inspired by Lully’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme; his music describes the same situations, and several of the movements are based on Lully’s music. Yet never before have these works been released together, presumably because of the distance between the compositions in terms of time and style: modern orchestras play Strauss and specialized baroque orchestras play Lully. In the words of artistic director Terje Tønnesen, “It is exciting when the same musicians with the same instruments try to recreate the sounds of these very different epochs. We in the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra endeavour to create something unique that makes our recordings meaningful.”

Conductor Terje Tønnesen is one of Norway’s leading violinists with a distinguished reputation in Norway’s classical music world as artistic director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and concertmaster of Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra.