Charpentier: Litanies de la Vierge, Motets pour la maison de Guise

Featuring

Sébastien Daucé
Lucile Perret
Matthieu Bertaud
Ensemble Correspondances
Marc-Antoine Charpentier

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Historical Context

Marie de Lorraine, also known as Mademoiselle de Guise, was a great music lover whose tastes were shaped by listening to oratorios in Florence during her family's exile.

Composer Biography

Marc-Antoine Charpentier lived at the Hôtel de Guise in Paris for nearly twenty years, from the early 1670s until the death of Mademoiselle de Guise in 1688.

Performer Biography

Sébastien Daucé, the director of Ensemble Correspondances, has dedicated several years to the music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, even editing three of his operas.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Charpentier often reused and modified his works for different occasions, adapting instrumentation and forces based on available resources, rather than considering a composition fixed once written.

Compositional Technique

Charpentier's motets for the House of Guise feature an unusual scoring of six mixed voices crowned by two instrumental treble parts, creating a rich and dense harmonic spectrum.

Interpretation

The Ensemble Correspondances' interpretation of these motets uses an instrumental lineup of two violins, two flutes, and a continuo group with two string basses, reflecting Charpentier's own flexible approach to scoring.

Composition History

The musicians in Mademoiselle de Guise's household, for whom Charpentier composed, were not professionals but were highly talented, with their music compared favorably to that of the king.