Friday 12 July 2019, 9.30pm
Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, Saintes
Festival de Saintes / Abbayes aux Dames
Friday 6 September 2019, 8pm
Verden Cathedral
Musikfest Bremen
Monday 16 March 2020, 8pm
Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, BOZAR
Co-production Klarafestival (In the framework of The European Galas)
Program
Mass Si Deus pro nobis et Magnificat by Orazio Benevolo
Cantate Domino by Claudio Monteverdi
Miserere by Gregorio Allegri (only for the concert in Versailles)
& motets by Frescobaldi and Palestrina
Le Concert Spirituel 8 choirs for 4 voices
7 chefs de choeur en relais
1h10 (without intermission)
Hervé Niquet would especially like to thank Elisabeth Geiger and Philippe Canguilhem without whom this project could never have been achieved. Posthumous thanks go to Jean Lionnet for the transcriptions of Benevolo’s works.
The score of Benevolo’s Magnificat for 16 voices found at the Library of Trento has been given by Marco Giuliani to Philippe Canguilhem.
With the support of the Fondation Bettencourt-Schueller, dedicated to promoting choral singing.
Monumental baroque for 8 choirs
Hervé Niquet has built this program of monumental polyphony in the wake of Alessandro Striggio’s 40-parts Mass’s success story. For Le Concert Spirituel’s 30th anniversary, Hervé Niquet decided to prove his expertise on monumental baroque once more, and rebuild the musical « déroulé » of a religious service, like it happened back then at St Louis of the French in Roma. The program will illustrate the triumph of the Roman papacy, mainly embodied nowadays in the architectural legacy of Borromini and Bernini.
Le Concert Spirituel will present another UFO from the mid-XVIIth century, the Mass “Si Deus pro nobis” by Orazio Benevolo. Born in Rome in 1605, Benevolo is nowadays almost completely forgotten about. He was nevertheless considered, both during his lifetime and 50 years at least after his death, one of the worthiest successors of Palestrina.
This typical Italian work, opulent, theatrical and bright seduced Hervé Niquet by its extremely wide and sounding architecture and its post-Palestrinian counterpoint.
