Noël

Recettes de boissons de Noël : cidres, chocolats chauds, cocktails, et plus encore !
Quel bas de Noël joyeux et joyeux pour les fêtes …

Michel Corrette was a French organist and composer with a long and prolific career. The two works here were composed 47 years apart, and the earlier Nouveau Livre de Noëls is not even an especially early work of this little-known composer. Despite the time difference, they don't differ sharply in style. The Messe pour le temps de Noël, composed in 1788, shows few traces of Classical-period opera or even of the late Baroque Italian vocal style, even though Corrette wrote a pedagogical work instructing his readers in the fine points of Italian music. The French style was simply extraordinarily persistent.

This is another sensational performance of Saint-Säens’ Oratorio de Noël. If this ain’t a masterpiece, it’s so damned close. The singers and choir are stellar. The Dresden Philharmonic brings more of a symphonic strength to Opus 12 than its French counterpart: being the man I am, I appreciate this. Perhaps ‘Expectants expectavi Dominum’ is more seductively sung in the French version but there ain’t much between them.