‘Extravagances of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque’
Season
2024/2025
Mass for 40 solo voices by Striggio and other works by Corteccia, Monteverdi and Benevolo
‘The most immense contrapuntal music ever written in the West between 1500 and 2000’ is back! Le Concert Spirtuel and Hervé Niquet present Alessandro Striggio's Mass for forty solo voices. A pinnacle of the art of counterpoint in Europe, it mysteriously disappeared without trace for over four centuries...
Cast
Le Concert Spirituel choir and orchestra
Hervé Niquetdirection
Programme
Alessandro Striggio
Missa sopra « Ecco si beato giorno » pour quarante voix solistes
Motet « Ecce beatam lucem » à quarante voix
Francesco Corteccia
Harmonised Proper plainchant
Claudio Monteverdi
Memento for eight voices
Orazio Benevolo
Laetatus sum
Miserere
Magnificat à deux chœurs
Production
Le Concert Spirituel
Duration
1h10 minutes
without intermission
Photo credit
Le Concert Spirituel procession in the Cité de l'architecture in 2012 (c)Step by step productions
Additional information
Forty solo singers take to the stage in ‘procession’ to the sound of a 12th-century conduit: that's how this programme, which praises the excesses of the Italian Renaissance, begins.
Sacred works by Monteverdi and Benevolo, Kapellmeister of the Church of Saint-Louis-des-Français in Rome and described by his peers as the ‘Palestrina of our time’, mingle with the sounds of Alessandro Striggio's Missa sopra Ecco si beato giorno for forty separate voices, the real highlight of this programme.
This gigantic, sensual mass was composed by Striggio (the Elder, father of the librettist of Monteverdi's Orfeo) at the court of Florence, for the Medici dynasty. Performed in the greatest courts of Europe by the composer, famous in his time and the envy of many composers, it then mysteriously disappeared without a trace for more than four centuries...
It's a challenge worthy of Hervé Niquet, whose passion for rediscoveries regularly leads him to explore the rarest pieces in the repertoire with Le Concert Spirituel!
This programme was the subject of a recording, reference GCDSA 921623, and a DVD entitled ‘Les Aventuriers de la Messe Perdue’, reference GVD 921624, both in 2012 for Glossa.
The 2025 tour of this program is supported by SPEDIDAM.
SPEDIDAM is a collective management organization which works to guarantee performing artists of all categories the rights that have been recognized to them.
