Messes

Description

Josquin and St Quentin is the 10th and final CD of the complete Josquin l’Européen series led by La Chapelle des Flandres since 2006, which will conclude on August 27, 2021, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of the famous composer.
Why Josquin and St Quentin?
Saint-Quentin is the main town of Vermandois, the region where Josquin Desprez was born and raised, and next to which, in Condé-sur-l’Escaut, he ended his life.
The complete Josquin l’Européen series concludes with two works that perfectly reveal the art of Josquin, a mass from his maturity, dazzling in mastery, comparable to the masses of L’Homme armé (see Josquin and Rome 1, vol 3) and another from his very youth, where yet all his know-how is already there, evident or nascent.
Here is what Juliette de Massy, the conductor of Métamorphoses, thinks of the first: “The theme of Malheur me bat is magnificent as it allows for a different characterization of movements and sections. I think this is the mass where I have best managed to grasp the architecture of the most complex passages. We had a lot of fun searching for colors, phrasings, bringing out each motif in its expression both the purest and the most loaded with intention.
I consider the mass L’ami Baudichon as the first mass composed by Josquin. But everything that will come later is already there: mathematical games with symmetries and inversions of the content, variations of the theme on all degrees of modality, almost humorous in my opinion, in any case jubilant.