Each month, the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles establishes a thematic playlist for you to experiment an immersive journey in the French musical repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries. Enjoy the music !
Playlist audio #8
The Christmas playlist by Nicolas Bucher, general manager of CMBV
For this Advent and Christmas season, I'm pleased to offer you a playlist that combines an absolute new work, just released, and three incunabula. Out of respect for the works and for the way in which the performers recorded them, I wanted to create three large blocks, which I advise you to listen to as such.
Let us take, if you please, in the order of the list :
Sébastien Daucé, the remarkable founder and artistic director of the Correspondance ensemble and current conductor in residence at the CMBV, has just delivered a magnificent version of Charpentier's Messe de Minuit.
This masterpiece among Charpentier’s masterpieces has accompanied me since my very first discoveries of French baroque music, and despite my intimate knowledge of it, I still find it as fresh, charming and inventive as ever. What talent Charpentier possesses! What craftsmanship, what tenderness, and what a joy it is to rediscover all these melodies that smell of Christmas trees and the smell of shortbread baked with the family.
Congratulations to Sébastien and his team for this new engraving of this endearing work ! And if you like, you can meet the CMBV's Pages and Singers at La Chapelle Royale on December 21st to hear their version of this mass conducted by Fabien Armengaud !
Then there's an incunabulum, with these Advent antiphons 'O' by the same Marc-Antoine Charpentier, taken from a 1990 recording by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Sublime music, not quite Christmas yet, but in the fervour that precedes it. Splendid chiaroscuro, like the painting on the cover of the first edition. A Proust madeleine too, but a work to be constantly rediscovered. On a very personal note : I love this ‘Arts Flos’ sound from the late 1980s so much. I'm sure it's a memory, but I can also hear the energy and emotion of rediscovery, which, as we all know, only happens once.
Finally, a bit of the Pages et Chantres from the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, of course! Another very old recording (1997), the CMBV was 10 years old. The recording has aged a little, let's admit it, the choir no longer sings like this, but Brossard's Mass, conceived in the same spirit as Charpentier's, never gets old! Using Christmas melodies (known as "timbres"), it unfolds the ordinary of the Mass in a very different way to Charpentier's, singing Christmas at every bar.
To punctuate all this, I have chosen some of my favourite Christmas melodies by Balbastre, for harpsichord, fortepiano or organ, played by harpsichordist Olivier Baumont, a long-standing partner of the CMBV who recorded this virtuoso and touching music for Radio-France's iconic 'Tempéraments' series and my friend Jean-Michel Verneiges !
Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone… in French baroque music !
