Messe de Requiem

According to Camille Saint-Saëns, Charles Gounod ought to be better known for his church music than for his operas. This gives some idea of the unprecedented quality of his sacred works, to which he devoted not only his unwavering faith but also the highest degree of his musical skill. Gounod s Requiem in particular foreshadows Fauré, Duruflé and Poulenc and constitutes one of the masterpieces of the genre. On this new disc from Mirare, Michel Corboz and the Ensemble Vocal et Instrumentale de Lausanne offer insightful and reverential performances of both the Requiem and the Messe Chorale.

" contains three classic musique concrète compositions from Michel Chion. All were produced at the GRM in Paris (the acousmatic headquarters of the world). The itself is an electronic take on the traditional form. is a ‘technical study’ which takes an original waltz theme and fragments it. is considered a ‘monodrama’ — that is, a drama centering around one ‘character.’ In this case what we hear are the detached reactions of this ‘character’ to a nightmare. It’s French, it’s acousmatic… what more could you ask for?"

Charles Gounod (1818-1893), in the view of Camille Saint-Saëns, ought to have been better-known for his church music than for his operas. This gives some idea of the quality of his sacred works, to which he devoted not only his unwavering faith but also the highest degree of musical skill. His Requiem in particular, presages Fauré, Duruflé and Poulenc, and constitutes one of the masterpieces of the genre.

Hypnos, God of Sleep… Simon-Pierre Bestion’s recordings are often inspired by his desire to recreate a ritual. His aim here was to recreate a Requiem service, ‘the ceremony that accompanies the passage of a human being into the hereafter, while supporting the feelings of all who witness it. Making use of all the freedom that this act of re-creation afforded me, I constructed this programme without boundaries between repertories or different musical aesthetics – from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the twentieth century – selecting the works for their captivating musical material, their hypnotic and meditative dimension’. Intonations from Byzantine chant sit alongside guttural voices in Giacinto Scelsi and the English vocal style of John Tavener; Franco-Flemish Renaissance polyphony encounters the influences of eastern or western spiritual traditions present in the contemporary works.