The “Nativity” cover for the Pastorales de Noel album (courtesy of PIAS)
It seems as if celebrating the spirit of Christmas through music gets earlier and earlier by the year. This year, “first out of the gate” seems to be a harmonia mundi album of performances by Les Arts Florissants entitled Pastorales de Noel. It will be released this coming Friday; but, as many readers will probably expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.
This is a two-CD release of six compositions, all vocal in a diversity of combinations. Accompaniment is provided by instruments associated with music from the late seventeenth century. There are six compositions distributed roughly equally across the two CDs and a rich diversity of vocal soloists. The ensemble is Les Arts Florissants directed by William Christie. This combines the full extent of vocal ranges (including countertenor) with accompaniment by period instruments including winds, strings, and organ. For the most part, the vocal sources reflect on the Nativity, but there is also a Magnificat with instrumental accompaniment for countertenor, tenor, and bass.
The entire album is devoted to a single composer, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who flourished for much of the last quarter of the seventeenth century. (He died in 1704.) As an atheist, my approach to music associated with the Nativity is an abstract one. Nevertheless, there is an engaging diversity in how Charpentier finds just the right ways to associate instrumentation with text. Unless my ears are playing tricks on me, all of the vocal compositions are sung one-to-a-part; and often the individual qualities of the singers blend engagingly with the individual qualities of the instrumental resources.
Charpentier should not be a stranger to at least some readers. Both American Bach Soloists and the California Bach Society have included them in their respective repertoires. Where recordings are concerned, Jordi Savall led a performance of Charpentier’s setting of the Te Deum hymn for an Alla Vox album. I have not followed Christie as closely as I have tried to keep up with Savall, but I still enjoy Christie’s Monteverdi album (the entirety of Claudio Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione de Poppea), which dates back a little over seven years ago!
