French Baroque music has never achieved the general familiarity of its German and Italian cousins, but that's not for any lack of trying on the part of conductor Sébastien Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances. What you get here is a Pastorale de Noël -- a fairly short but grand Christmas narrative -- plus one set of "Antiennes de O," or O Anthems, so called because each one begins with the word "O." The second half of the Pastorale was revised twice, and the two later versions are included here. The anthems are in a ...
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French Baroque music has never achieved the general familiarity of its German and Italian cousins, but that's not for any lack of trying on the part of conductor Sébastien Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances. What you get here is a Pastorale de Noël -- a fairly short but grand Christmas narrative -- plus one set of "Antiennes de O," or O Anthems, so called because each one begins with the word "O." The second half of the Pastorale was revised twice, and the two later versions are included here. The anthems are in a slightly different style: they lack the paired violins and the singsong melodies of the Pastorale, a genre that evolved from secular roots (the stories are about shepherds and shepherdesses, which didn't take a lot of massaging to be applied to the Christmas story). So, there's some scholarly subtlety on display here, but the main attraction -- the complete Pastorale as performed on the album's first 22 tracks -- is absolutely gorgeous. It consists of alternating solos and tutti, many of...
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