Requiem

With this programme, I return to French Baroque sacred music, which is especially dear to me. Campra’s Requiem is a work that deeply fascinates me: it is a Mass for the dead that sets aside any sense of tragedy, unfolding instead with a profoundly moving serenity. For Campra, death is not an end to be feared, but rather a hope: the possibility of attaining eternal life. It is a work that enjoyed immense success from its very first performances and quickly spread throughout France.

In Charpentier, I admire a mastery and a craftsmanship that, to my mind, set him above all others. He forged an eminently personal style, notably through his harmonic language: just a few notes are enough to recognise his hand. He is truly the great master of sacred music of the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth, endowed with a remarkable sense of contrast and architectural balance, nowhere more evident than in the Missa Assumpta est Maria.

Christophe Rousset