Sébastien Morillon

Un rayon de soleil traverse l’azur du petit matin et réchauffe le cœur d’une douce caresse… Dès le premier mouvement (largo) du Trio en la Majeur, Sébastien Marq expose son jeu doux et velouté, léger et transcendant. Et l’on s’émerveille, béat, devant la beauté du son, la justesse des sentiments, et ce toucher si délicat qui vous berce et vous emmène dans un jardin d’Eden. Le voyage s’achève sur quatre mêmes notes, plus suaves et doucereuses que les précédentes.

Ce programme est l’évocation d’une bibliothèque imaginaire, celle de Jean-Baptiste Matho, célèbre chanteur de la Chapelle royale sous le règne de Louis XIV. Un testament musical au tournant du XVIIIe siècle, dans l’univers si particulier du petit motet pour taille (ténor), convoquant tour à tour Charpentier, Campra, Bouteiller, Suffret et bien sûr Brossard, qui nous interpelle par ce magnifique exorde : ‘Silentium. Dormi in hortis dilecta mea. Silence. Dors dans les jardins, mon amour.’"

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 new recording, 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.

Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) is still known today, but for the wrong reason. People no longer know him for his compositions, but for his 'Dictionaire de Musique' from 1703, a work that is still a valuable source of French music from the seventeenth century. Brossard's music enjoyed a considerable popularity at the time. Brossard was also a valued teacher and a large collector: in 1725 he donated a large collection of manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Royale. He added a few works of his own, according to his own words 'because there were still some empty folders'.

Northward ho! Sébastien Daucé and his musicians here make a geographical detour, forsaking England and France in order to explore Lutheran Europe before J. S. Bach. One is struck by the expressive vigour of these finely detailed works, which have retained all their power to fascinate today’s listeners. Merging old and new, the austerely beautiful language of Buxtehude, Schütz and the much more rarely heard Dijkman unexpectedly echoes the music of their contemporary Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

Sébastien de Brossard, an enthusiastic collector of music, pedagogue and author of the first dictionary of music, was also a very talented composer. This champion of Italian music and great connoisseur of the music of Carissimi probably took the Roman master as the model for his two oratorios. Leandro, a dramatic work in Italian, is a miniature masterpiece and one of the earliest cantatas by a French composer.

Campra’s famous Requiem emerged from a tradition that is still unjustly neglected. Sébastien Daucé and Ensemble Correspondances offer us an opportunity to discover these maîtres de musique of Notre-Dame who, though now overshadowed by their brilliant colleague, made no less of a contribution to the development of the ‘French style’ emblematic of the reign of Louis XIV.