Search - Ensemble L'Apotheose, Ensemble Vocale Ricercare :: Charpentier: Miserere & Other Sacred Works

Charpentier (Paris 1643-1704) was never court composer to Louis XIV. In 1683 he was not selected to be sous-maître of the royal chapel, and contrary to his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lully, he neither dictated the rules in his contemporary world of opera, nor did he get involved in the political or social dynamic of Versailles, the real driving force behind French musical taste. Unlike Lully, he never enjoyed unchallenged and long-lasting fame, he was denied this by his contemporaries, and then he was rediscovered and redeemed in the 1900s. Still, the indisputable quality throughout the breadth of his work remains clear. Charpentier gave life to a luxuriant production of sacred music (more than 500 works), whose refinement of compositional language is clear as in his petites motets. The selection of pieces for voice, flute, string instrument and others proposed here by L'Apothéose and Ricercare takes the melodic refinement and harmony that typifies Charpentier's interpretation of this genre to heart and it opens with a diptych that he conceived.