Three sacred narratives, three figures confronted with absence: through Purcell, Ferrandini and Charpentier, Camille Delaforge and Il Caravaggio explore fear, doubt and solitude in their most deeply human forms. An album shaped by a ‘theatre of abandonment’ as spare as it is intense. 
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At seventeen, French conductor Camille Delaforge discovered the final chorus of Charpentier’s Le Reniement de saint Pierre: a ‘shock’ she would return to for years, eventually choosing the work as the starting point for this newly released Alpha Classics album. Alongside it, Purcell’s Saul and the Witch of Endor and Ferrandini’s Il pianto di Maria form a triptych centred on figures caught at the moment when faith begins to falter: Saul abandoned by God, Mary at the foot of the Cross, and Peter coming to terms with his betrayal.
All three works place drama centre stage. In Purcell, Saul ventures into the night in search of one last answer from the Witch of Endor; Ferrandini gives Mary a voice of her own to express her suffering; Charpentier leads Peter towards the realisation of his denial. Three concise scenes in which economy of means never diminishes the intensity, but concentrates it.
Camille Delaforge brings together seven singers for the programme. Floriane Hasler carries Il pianto di Maria alone; Apolline Raï-Westphal, Mathias Vidal and Guilhem Worms give voice to Purcell’s drama, while Raï-Westphal is joined by Laura Jarrell, Bastien Rimondi, Jordan Mouaïssia and Guilhem Worms in Le Reniement de saint Pierre. Alongside them, Il Caravaggio deploys a compact instrumental line-up of strings, viola da gamba, double bass and theorbo, with Delaforge herself at the harpsichord and organ.
Among the works featured, Giovanni Battista Ferrandini’s Il pianto di Maria stands out for the immediacy of its conception. In this substantial cantata for mezzo-soprano and strings, long attributed to Handel, Mary herself speaks at the foot of the Cross. Where the Stabat Mater traditionally adopts an external viewpoint, Ferrandini makes her the protagonist of the drama: grief, doubt and abandonment are all expressed in the first person.
Yet after this journey through solitude, the album ends in light with Purcell’s When Orpheus sang, all nature did rejoice, sung by Floriane Hasler. Orpheus’s song symbolically restores order to the world and, after fear and silence, opens onto a community reunited.
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