The large-scale sacred music of the French court remains among the most neglected repertories of the Baroque era. Here's an excellent place to start with it. The Te Deum, the quintessential Catholic hymn of praise, was a favored text for big moments at court, and the two examples here must be among the finest. Jean-Baptiste Lully's Te Deum, LWV 55, during whose premiere the composer fatally stabbed himself in the foot with a staff, was composed to celebrate the Sun King's recovery, via a pretty ghastly surgery, from what appears to have been a severe case of hemorrhoids. The more cheerful occasion of Charpentier's setting was a French military victory in the Low Countries. In both cases you get full-scale splendor, with chorus, brass, and orchestra in harmonically static settings.
Niquet’s performances of Charpentier with Le Concert Spirituel are generally characterised by their liveliness. Niquet uses quite small forces, which emphasises the chamber nature of much of Charpentier’s writing, even in his grandest works. Niquet’s version of the Te Deum is one of the bounciest that I have heard. Crisp and lively playing from the instrumentalists emphasises the work’s dance-like qualities in a charming way. The faster sections are taken with remarkable speed and dexterity, but never feel rushed and they contrast admirably with the slower movements.
Both of us have grown up with this music from the cradle of our earliest infancy; […] It is music that allowed us to become what we are, while at the same time encouraging us to question things constantly. […] Now, playing the music – because, as we all know, we play rather than make music – has become a part that each of us plays, played here as a double act. Each one for himself, with his instrument as a crucible, and at the same time each of us for the other, since after all we are engaged in a performance.
It was 1988, and at that time the vast majority of Charpentier’s works were still accessible only via the original sources, so we had to rely on microfilms of the composer’s complete works collected in the twenty-eight manuscript volumes known as “Meslanges”. Poring over the manuscript pages on the screen of our microfilm reader, I studied and selected the works for the programme on the basis of the original texts.