Album
|
Charpentier: Messe pour le Port RoyalEmmanuel Mandrin Director
|
||||||
Loading, please wait...
This disc, originally recorded for Astrée in 1997, has been reissued by Naïve, a label mostly devoted to original material. Perhaps the label's motivation is connected with its general effort to revive the music of the seventeenth century in authentic and exciting performances; the Messe pour le Port-Royal of Marc-Antoine Charpentier is a genuinely unusual work from the period, and this recording was the first to try to make it sound something like how it did when it was originally performed. The notes are quite detailed (and in almost illegibly small print, with translations into English and Spanish from the original French), and they represent part of an ongoing scholarly discussion about the group of works of which this mass is part, and of which church called Port-Royal the work was intended for. The average Baroque fan doesn't need to worry about the issues involved; the work's unusual qualities are evident on first hearing. In place of the sunny, sumptuous tunefulness that charaterizes much of Charpentier's sacred choral music, the Messe pour le Port-Royal is somber and a bit severe, with chantlike monody separated by arias and duos that emphasize a point in the text. The treatment of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection in the center of the Credo is particularly elevated, with a sudden symbolic shift into triple meter at the Incarnatus and the whole stretch of text punctuated with dramatic pauses. The mass is for women's choir; the original singers would have been nuns. Here the movements are introduced with passages of chant from a male singer (the celebrant of the mass at the time) and interspersed with improvised organ passages, both practices that would have reflected the way the mass was used when Charpentier composed it. The improvised organ sections ("couplets") by Michel Chapuis, performed on a splendidly powerful organ from 1735, are particularly striking; they jump out of the muted textures like lightning bolts. The 10 voices of Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr, who use an unusual French-accented Latin ("Sanctus" comes out with the French "u," like "Sanctees"), don't have the bright innocence one instinctively associates with Charpentier, but the performance as a whole has a rough, serious beauty. The program is rounded out with two motets and two other shorter pieces that are similar in mood to the mass. Highly recommended to anyone who likes Charpentier and wants to hear his music in a new way. © James Manheim, All Music Guide
Portions of Content Provided by All Music Guide.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
© 2008 All Media Guide, LLC. All Music Guide is a registered trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.
