This release by the Baroque-oriented British early music group La Nuova Musica has an unusually tightly unified program, joined together not only by the theme of sacrifice but also by the growing musical interchange between Italy and France in the 17th century. Marc-Antoine Charpentier was Giacomo Carissimi's student, and it shows in the highly operatic treatment of St. Peter's denial of Christ in Le reniement de Saint Pierre (tracks 2-4), so different from the official French style of Lully. The program of short oratorios, ...
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This release by the Baroque-oriented British early music group La Nuova Musica has an unusually tightly unified program, joined together not only by the theme of sacrifice but also by the growing musical interchange between Italy and France in the 17th century. Marc-Antoine Charpentier was Giacomo Carissimi's student, and it shows in the highly operatic treatment of St. Peter's denial of Christ in Le reniement de Saint Pierre (tracks 2-4), so different from the official French style of Lully. The program of short oratorios, the ancestors of Messiah and the other grand works of the High Baroque, is effective, and the performance of Carissimi's Jephte itself, the classic of the genre, is impassioned and honed by a period of live performance of the program at hand. La Nuova Musica is slightly small at two voices per part in the choral passages, but that difficult combination is handled well, and the singers obviously feel the style. Charpentier's Sacrificium Abrahae, rarely performed, perhaps suffers in...
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