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Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp A new disc of delights from the sprawling oeuvre of Charpentier is always welcome, especially when it comes from an ensemble as reliable and adaptable as Arcangelo. A quick glance at the list of singers and instrumentalists gathered by Jonathan Cohen for these recordings is assurance enough that they won’t lack for expertise, musicality or style. Top billing has been given to three Leçons de Ténèbres for Holy Wednesday, with their anguished texts from the Lamentations. The booklet does not make it clear that, unlike Couperin’s more famous settings, this is not a set but three separate pieces brought together. And nor do they sound like a set, for each has its own style and scoring: baritone, recorders and strings in the First Lesson; high tenor and continuo in the Second; and baritone, flutes and strings in the Third. They thus lack the unity of the Couperin, as well as some of its grace, but they are the works of a master nevertheless, full of the kinds of immediate melodic and harmonic expressive details Charpentier had learnt in Italy and assumed so effortlessly into his native style. The most lyrically attractive of them is the Second, superbly sung here by Samuel Boden, the latest in a distinguished line of English tenors to make themselves at home in the French haute-contre repertory. Stéphane Degout is less pliantly lyrical and involving in the other two Lessons but creates his own world of weary desolation. These works are only half of the disc, however, for before them come three other pieces no less ravishing. The lovingly written Litanies de la vierge for six voices and instruments, the delicious Ouverture pour le sacre d’un évêque and the skilfully turned ground-bass Magnificat for three male voices (Boden, Thomas Walker and Ashley Riches) have been recorded before by Les Arts Florissants (Harmonia Mundi, 5/80, 9/89) and – minus the Magnificat – Ensemble Correspondances (Harmonia Mundi, 11/13), and if Cohen does not quite match the firm-toned urgency of those, his more transparent performances are no less tender and sensitive. |
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