Travel Motets · Dumont & Charpentier
03.10.21 ___ 20:00
Salle Philharmonique de Liège, Liège
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Henry Dumont was born in Liège in 1610. He arrived in Paris around 1638 with a solid musical background (in singing, organ and composition learnt beside great masters). He rapidly got the coveted position of organist at St Paul parish, at the heart of the Marais, a neighbourhood that was newly popular and frequented by nobility and the upper class. He then reached positions at the court that make him, though was a stranger, one of the great creators of the French arts wished by Louis XIV.
Henri Dumont brought out a deep change in sacred music of his century: widespread in Italian music, passionate about the expressivity he can draw from the text, he offered a light writing style, extremely sensual, in which dissonances appeared brightly. With his colleague Pierre Robert, they are the two artisans of a new genre: the great motet, which remains the symbol of sacred music of the French kings until French Revolution.
This new form was built all along the 1660s and became a model in the following decades. If the great motet has become a great form, gathering choirs, soloists and an orchestra, its beginning was more intimate, mainly because the available musicians at the Royal Chapel were limited: two violins, a basso continuo, a few children and cantors. It is for this headcount that the first pieces by Dumont for the king’s chapel were composed.
At the end of his life, the great motet had evolved, following the taste of the monarch and the increasing number of musicians of the chapel. When he died in 1684, Dumont had a great reputation, and Louis XIV gave the edition of his great motets to his widow. The recent researches have showed that this post-mortem edition was the occasion for the editor to reorganize it, in order to bring the motets up to date, especially by adding orchestra parts, to conform to the power in place at that time at the chapel. For the instrumental parts, we have chosen to keep the original version with two violin parts.
The royal chapel worked then with a mix of children for the highest parts, and professional male singers (the cantors), who sang the parts of haute-contre, taille, basse-taille and bass, from the highest to the lowest. If the regular headcount was probably around fifteen singers in the 1660s, we have chosen here a lighter version, with one or two singers by part, which could correspond to a precise historical reality: the king’s travels. The ordered life of the court did not avoid royal caprices, and Louis XIV could decide overnight to thwart the daily programme of the court to go hunting, walking or even banter in the other royal residences.
In this case, mobile teams were sent to the new place: furniture, kitchen but also music. One can easily imagine that Dumont’s motets, appreciated by Louis XIV, were played for these occasions, especially numerous given that the court was not yet sedentary back then.
If Charpentier has not spent a lot of time at the court during his Parisian career (he however knew about Dumont’s music when the latter officiated at St Paul, very nearby the Hôtel de Guise), his religious music, partly composed by his protector Marie de Guise, may have known the same itinerancy. Because she did not hold a great chapel inside the Hôtel de Guise, this princess used to move to Paris (N.D. de la Mercy, Abbaye royale de Montmartre) as well as in the countryside (especially in Alençon of which she was the duchess) accompanied by her music. Also, as well as Dumont’s, some sacred pieces of Charpentier have travelled the roads of the realm to resonate in chapels probably rarely honoured by such beautiful sounds.
PROGRAMME
Henri Dumont · Memorare O piissima Virgo Maria
Marc-Antoine Charpentier · Transfige dulcissime Jesu
Henri Dumont · O Aeterne misericors Deus
Marc-Antoine Charpentier · Salve Regina H.23
Henri Dumont · Quam Pulchra es
Henri Dumont · O Mysterium
Henri Dumont · Sub umbra
Henri Dumont · Allemande en Ut
Henri Dumont · O Dulcissima virgo
Henri Dumont · Desidero te millies
Henri Dumont · Super Flumina Babylonis
Booking information : Les Nuits de septembre
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