Messe de Noel

With four recordings in six months, this seems to be open season for the Poulenc motets. The newcomers are up against stiff competition, and don't emerge unscathed from comparison either with the college next door (under Marlow on Conifer) or with the choir under the musical director of the one further along the road (Rutter on Collegium/Gamut).

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.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was the most distinguished French religious composer of his era, whose output includes Masses, motets,psalms and oratorios, many of them extended works rich in texture, color and harmony, and contrapuntally resourceful. Melodically, Charpentier derived a distinctive style, imposing French embellishments and phrase structure on a basically Italian idiom. His 30 or so theater pieces reveal wit and facility. Unfortunately, he remains known for only two works, both of which are on this disc.

This is a disc of Christmas music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704), all the works written during the 1690s possibly for performance at the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis where the composer was Master of the Music. The wide variety of mood, colour and style underlines the extraordinary versatility and originality of this composer, upon whom Carissimi was the strongest influence during his student days in Rome in the 1660s. He was highly prolific (there are no less than 35 works in the oratorio style) and wrote a great deal of both moving and dramatic music.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was the French composer of the Grand Siècle who left the largestnumber of works specifically related to Christmas. Here, going beyond the famous Messe de Minuit,listeners will be all the more enchanted by his histoires sacrées (brief oratorios) and Noëls pourles instruments when they are presented by thecomposer’s most fervent advocates.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) was a French composer who was a contemporary of Louis XIV. Charpentier created liturgical works full of grace and energy, using great imagination for his musical settings. This is very much evident in the selections for this recording, the TE DEUM and the MESSE DE MINUIT. The first one is a joyously triumphant interpretation of the thanksgiving text, using eight soloists, chorus and orchestra, including three trumpets, something unusual for the times.

French Baroque music has never achieved the general familiarity of its German and Italian cousins, but that's not for any lack of trying on the part of conductor Sébastien Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances. What you get here is a Pastorale de Noël a fairly short but grand Christmas narrative plus one set of "Antiennes de O," or O Anthems, so called because each one begins with the word "O."