Missa macula non est in te (avec Charpentier & Lully : motets)

Description

At the heart of 17th-century French sacred music with Le Concert Spirituel. Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel once again explore the splendid world of 17th-century French sacred music and introduce us to a barely known composer - Louis Le Prince -, chapel master in Lisieux [Lower Normandy]. They perform his Missa Macula non est in te, interspersing it with a bouquet of motets by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (who is much better known today, largely thanks to the masterful recordings of his works by Niquet). The mass and the motets are performed in versions for female voices and instruments. Although some of the pieces on the disc were composed specifically for high voices, it was customary at the time to sing polyphonic masses with whatever vocal resources were available; it is virtually certain that at the time, Le Prince's six-voice mass - a tribute to the Virgin Mary - was sung in convents, and therefore by female voices only. This practice is described by Fannie Vernaz in the booklet accompanying the disc, and complements Hervé Niquet's exploration of Pierre Bouteiller's Requiem Mass (a work he adapted for a male choir). The magnificent sonorities of Charpentier's motets (and of a small motet by Jean-Baptiste Lully) complete an Office built by Niquet around the ordinary of the mass by Louis Le Prince; in this way he demonstrates, in irresistible fashion, the variety and splendor of the music of the Grand Siècle, that of Louis XIV.