Messe à quatre choeurs · An Italian travel diary

Paris, 1665: a young composer leaves the Saint-Michel district to embark on a journey to Rome. The journey promises to be a long one, its stopovers rich in encounters for Charpentier . . . On this CD, Sébastien Daucé invites us on an imaginary recreation of that voyage of initiation, from Cremona (Merula) to Rome (Beretta), by way of Venice (Cavalli) and Bologna (Cazzati). A journey in space, but also in time, through the sources of inspiration of a composer whose future works were to recall the colours of Italy – as the magnificent Mass for four choirs testifies..

Les Plaisirs du Louvre

Before Versailles, the focus of the power in the Kingdom of France was the Louvre, a true place of of ceremonials in which music should shine with splendor. During the reign of Louis XIII, the air de cour and the ballet engage the most acknowledged composers such as Moulinié, Guédron and Chancy. The most celebrated of them, Boesset, will contribute to the evolution of the polyphonic air from the Renaissance toward a more private dimension : far from the upcoming opulence of Louis XIV, a collection of delicate miniatures composes this recording.

The Coronation of Louis XIV

On 7 June 1654, in the Cathedrale of Reims, Louis Dieudonné de Bourbon becomes Louis XIV, king of France. Rediscovered over a careful investigation, the musics played during this coronation ceremony revive thanks to a significant number of musicians, arranged according to their original position in the cathedral. The ensemble Correspondances offers with Les Pages from the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles a musical Coronation of Louis XIV, spatialized in the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

Histoires sacrées

Histoires Sacrées (Sacred Stories) by Charpentier represent an exception in the musical creation of this period: inspired by Roman music, they set to music like a little sacred opera an edifying story from the Bible or the history of the Saints. This double CD is accompanied by the DVD of the show Three Women – Sacred Stories, directed by Vincent Huguet.

Ballet royal de la Nuit

The exceptional reconstruction of the score of Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit, the result of three years of research, allowed modern audiences to discover a major musical event of the seventeenth century, the unprecedented moment that inaugurated the reign of the Sun King. After the public and critical success of the CD-book released on harmonia mundi, the ensemble returned to this extraordinary spectacle in 2017 at the Théâtre de Caen, the Opéra Royal de Versailles and the Opéra de Dijon, in a contemporary production by Francesca Lattuada combining elements of the circus and the dance.

Perpetual Night

The circulation of artists and sovereigns between France and England in the seventeenth century resulted in the establishment of highly original genres in the latter country: the first recitatives, large-scale airs from masques and dramatic ‘scenes’ provided fertile ground for experimentation and prepared the way for the birth of semi-opera. Sébastien Daucé explores this vocal art in a programme tailor-made for one of today’s most fascinating voices: Lucile Richardot, in the exquisite setting provided by Correspondances, subtly blends music, love, night and melancholy.

La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers

Until Charpentier, the myth of Orpheus had never provided the subject matter for an opera in French.He repaired the omission with this fascinating little gem on the margins of the large-scale tragédie lyrique. Charpentier offers us here a myth left un suspension, without a resolution, a carefree and happy ‘descent’ that consecrates Orpheus’ song and the enchanting power of music. A poetic experience amid the depths of night.

Pastorale sur la naissance de notre Seigneur Jésus

Each year from 1684 to 1686, Marc-Antoine Charpentier offered a Christmas pastorale to his patron, Marie de Lorraine. After the death of the boy Louis-Joseph, the last male of the line, the figure of the Christ-child occupied a central place in the devotions of the Guise family. The pastorales and antiphons written in this context and recorded here are at the intersection of the sacred and secular genres, of the popular and the learned. They evoke the mystery of birth with a profoundly moving blend of naïveté and gravity.

O Mysterium

For 20 years (from 1663 to 1683), Henry Du Mont directed the music of the Sun King’s chapel. For the daily Mass heard he built up a new musical repertory consisting of motets for full chorus and more intimate pieces for solo voice. The former aimed to transpose to the context of the ‘ordinary’ the format of large-scale works conceived for extraordinary ceremonies. Sébastien Daucé presents an innovative approach to these ‘grands motets’ that at once links specific musical features with historical data and reveals their beauties in every detail.

Le Concert royal de la Nuit

The King dances. In late February 1653, just after the Fronde rebellion, the most influential spectacle of the early reign of Louis XIV was created at the Louvre: the Ballet royal de la Nuit. Grandiose, and carefully elaborated at the highest levels of the state, the libretto by Bensérade called upon the finest artists of the time. Banishing the troubles of the Night, Louis XIV danced in the Sun King costume that would henceforth be forever associated with i.

Leçons de ténèbres

When Lalande left this vale of tears, his fame was its height; between 1725 and 1730, he was the composer most frequently programmed in Paris. Audiences flocked to hear his motets, notably the three Leçons de Ténèbres and the Miserere for solo voice, written for the offices of Holy Week. Many composers had already produced settings of these texts in the France of the Sun King, making the Office of Tenebrae a genuine social event. True to the same aesthetic, Lalande exploited this art of ambiguity while deviating from tradition.

Meslanges pour la chapelle d’un prince

For more than 30 years, the career of Étienne Moulinié was inseparably linked with the patronage of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII. In his Mélanges sur des sujets chrétiens, which he regarded as his magnum opus, he claimed the right to a compositional freedom that would ‘purify music and make if wholly chaste’. Some of the finest pieces of the collection feature on this recording, showing how successfully the composer achieved his aim.

Litanies de la Vierge

In their first release on harmonia mundi France, Sébastien Daucé and his ensemble present a sumptuous interpretation of the six-voice motets composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier for the House of Guise. These works, headed by the Miserere, constitue and unexpected parenthesis in the music of the Grand Siècle. The creative genius, the inwardness and the intense fervor of a composer surrounded by his faithful company of singers and instrumentalists speak to us all the more intimately because Charpentier appears here as both copyist (the surviving scores are in his handwriting) and performer – he sans the haute-contre part.

L’Archange & Le Lys

Discovering what makes this music work requires study but also experimentation. Often all that remains of this magnificent counterpoint and subtle harmony is a few staves of manuscript paper, a text, and the odd clue left by contemporary sources: it is up to us collectively to imagine a sound, a direction, an instrumentation, so as to give this music its expressive contours and its rightful place in the French repertory. Far from the noise and high speed of the world of today, such music is an oasis of poetry and beauty.

O Maria !

“Charpentier is one of the most touching musical personalities of the Grand Siècle. Having frequented his music for more than ten years, through such varied activities as reading the Mélanges, listening to and editing his music, and musicological research, I suggested to the musicians of the Correspondances ensemble that we should devote a period of several months to work on the composer. Hence we wish to present this recording as the fruit of a year of research and collective work aiming at producing a specific sound and specific tone-colors, the shared invention of which was guided by assiduous frequentation of a large number of pieces composed around 1680. After discovering the riches of all these compositions, plucked all these flowers, we left it to the process of distillation to do the rest: the final programme offers an opportunity to hear the finest pieces among those we read through, which in our view constitute the quintessence of the composer’s style during this period.’ Sébastien Daucé!