Le Concert Spirituel . Hervé Niquet

French music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is still the least-known branch of baroque and classical music. Not that the music written in France during this period was lacking in quality or interest. But the French often used a very typical style, full of idiosyncrasies and particular turns, which only yield their secrets in a perfectly idiomatic rendition. Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet have devoted themselves to this French baroque style with so much intensity in the past few years that they have become one with it. Their concerts are a unique opportunity for non-initiates to discover this repertoire. Witness their recordings of the work of the great master of French baroque music, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1634-1704), whose 'Motet pour l'Offertoire de la Messe Rouge' they are performing at this concert. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, André Campra (1660-1744) was one of the leading French composers of religious music. His compositions often hover on the borderline between rhetorical baroque and sophisticated rococo. Moreover, Campra integrated Italian elements in his music, eventually catering for the 'goût réuni' propagated by François Couperin and others.