Le Concert Spirituel & Herve Niquet – Benevolo: Missa si Deus pro nobis & Magnificat (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:03:50 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

In the 17th century, Roman churches were competing to put on the greatest show to celebrate their patron saints. On these occasions, extraordinary services were performed, where many different artists would be brought together, singers and instrumentalists alike, alongside ordinary musicians, for sumptuous pieces performed by several vocal and instrumental choirs. One contemporary description gives an idea of the scale: ten choirs and ensembles played together, two on fixed stages, and eight others distributed symmetrically right along the nave, on platforms built for the occasion. Every additional stage was provided with a positive organ, while many other instruments added to the sonic splendour. So that all the musicians could play well together in spite of the distance, “capi di coro” or time-keeping drummers, would play in unison. Orazio Benevolo (1605-1672) was one of the most remarkable architects of these extravagant, multi-choral monuments. Benevolo was a choirboy at the Church of St. Louis of the French in Rome before he entered the upper echelons by taking the job of Chapel Master in 1638. The composer has left behind him an abundant set of works, containing no fewer than 34 motets for a range of players, including Regna terrae, written for twelve soprano parts distributed across six vocal choirs, each with its own basso continuo. We are also indebted to him for twelve versions of the Magnificat, for between eight and 24 voices, including one for 16 voices, in quadruple choir, which appears here. Hervé Niquet and his Concert Spirituel have made use of the ample acoustics in the Notre-Dame-du-Liban church in Paris, perfectly structured to hold several choirs distributed across the building, to create the sensations of immersion and spatial plenitude that the composer aimed for.

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Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet – Vivaldi: Gloria & Magnificat (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 50:29 minutes | 890 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Since 1987, the year he founded Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet has been a major figure in musical life, but he is also an actor in a class of his own. Major because it is thanks to his love of French music, the grands motets, large forms, and works both known and less known, that we have discovered or rediscovered treasures by Campra, Boismortier, Charpentier, Lully, Handel, Striggio, Offenbach, Grétry… Major because he is respected and loved by a great number of singers and stage directors with whom he has collaborated… And in a class of his own because he has an uncommon (or even unique, in the current musical landscape!) capacity for sharing his music directly with the audience. Alpha is delighted to welcome this great, ‘total’ artist to begin a long-term collaboration and release the fruit of his latest research, his wishes, his discoveries and his follies. In addition to the Don Quichotte concocted with his accomplices Shirley & Dino, the festivities begin in Venice, with Vivaldi’s deservedly famous Gloria and Magnificat, but in a version that we are not accustomed to hearing: ‘We have lots of things to discover in these works that we thought we knew,’ says an enthusiastic Hervé Niquet. ‘We propose a version of this « sausage » that is never heard.

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Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet – Lully: Persée 1770 (Collection “Château de Versailles”) (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:48:17 minutes | 1,94 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Nearly a century after its composition, Lully’s Persee was recreated in 1770 to mark an exceptional event: the inauguration of the Royal Opera House at Versailles Palace, built to celebrate the wedding of the Dauphin (the future Louis XVI) and Marie Antoinette. For this unique occasion, three composers (Antoine Dauvergne, Fran?ois Rebel and Bernard de Bury) were commissioned to revise Lully’s work and adapt it to the new circumstances and the new venue, which was regarded as absolutely extraordinary in its time.

Lovers of Lully’s opera will therefore meet their mythological hero again, now with a richer orchestration and more for the chorus and the ballet dancers to do. There were only two performances in 1770, but they were absolutely sumptuous: 95 choristers, 15 soloists, 80 dancers, 100 extras, 80 instrumentalists, five sets and 530 costumes. You can now relive that historic event thanks to a recording conducted by the leading specialist in this repertory, Herve Niquet, and a CD-book richly illustrated with engravings of the period and photos of the Opera Royal and of manuscripts of the score.

Recorded at Versailles Palace in 2016, in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.

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Le Concert Spirituel & Hervé Niquet – Lully: Armide 1778 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 02:17:10 minutes | 2,50 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Armide, premiered in 1686, was the last joint work of Lully and the poet Philippe Quinault. It immediately became a pillar of the Opéra’s repertory, which it finally left only in 1766, when it was removed to make room for a new wave of composers, Philidor, Grétry, Gossec and soon Gluck. A few attempts to restore former tastes still allowed audiences to hear such works as Persée, revived in 1770 (and recorded in that version by Hervé Niquet).

But these operas were profoundly modified in order to increase the role of the orchestra and tailor the vocal numbers to the singers of the day. This was the context for the fascinating and unpublished version of Armide that has lain dormant in the Bibliothèque Nationale for more than two centuries. The revisions to the original are by Louis-Joseph Francœur, nephew of the celebrated François Francœur, one of Louis XV’s court musicians.

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Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet – Cherubini & Plantade: Requiems pour Louis XVI & Marie Antoinette (Live Recording at La Chapelle Royale du Château de Versailles) (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:09:14 minutes | 1,19 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

In 1817, two years after the restoration of the monarchy by Louis XVIII, the French court attended a performance of Cherubini’s Requiem in memory of Louis XVI; a few years later, in 1823, the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Marie-Antoinette provided the occasion for giving Charles-Henri Plantade’s Messe des morts in her memory. Berlioz had just arrived in Paris, and Napoleon had recently died in exile on the island of Saint Helena. In 2015, the two works were presented in a single concert at Versailles Palace. While Cherubini’s Requiem, scored for mixed choir and orchestra, but without soloists, is well known, Charles-Henri Plantade’s setting, which shares the same formal characteristics, is a complete discovery. It provides a striking transitional stage between the models of the Ancien Régime and early Romanticism, and displays a wealth of invention reminiscent of Méhul, Cherubini and even Rossini. This is the first recording of the work, which was revived on the initiative of the Palazzetto Bru Zane. A noted specialist in French music and large-scale sacred forms, Hervé Niquet brings out the full strength of these two works, recorded in the Chapelle Royale at Versailles, which further enrich the Alpha/Château de Versailles collection.

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Le Concert Spirituel & Hervé Niquet – Berlioz: Messe solennelle (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 51:16 minutes | 865 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Composed in 1824 by Hector Berlioz at the age of twenty-one and premiered at the church of Saint-Roch in Paris in 1825, the Messe solennelle has come down to us following an eventful history. After Berlioz declared that he had destroyed the score, the mass was considered lost until it was rediscovered in Antwerp in 1992. This remarkable work helps us both to appreciate the development of Berlioz’s style – already revolutionary in his early years – and to understand what he owed to his contemporaries, notably Cherubini, whose monumental Requiem Hervé Niquet has already recorded (Alpha 251). Scored for three soloists (soprano, tenor and bass), chorus and orchestra, the work consists of thirteen movements, material from which Berlioz was to reuse in several later works, notably in the ‘Scène aux champs’ of the Symphonie fantastique, which quotes the ‘Gratias’. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Berlioz’s death, Hervé Niquet, fascinated by this work – ‘There’s nothing he doesn’t know about dramaturgy and vocal style. At the age of twenty!’ – decided to programme it (the concert at the famous Berlioz Festival of La Côte Saint-André was a memorable occasion) and record it in the Chapelle Royale of the Château de Versailles.

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