In Basel and Ribeauvillé: an intimate Charpentier from Voces Suaves and Ad Fontes

What becomes of a grand, solemn Mass when it is stripped of its finery? That is the question Voces Suaves and Ensemble Ad Fontes, under the direction of Martin Gester, will explore in two performances in Basel and Ribeauvillé (France) in early October. The answer: a concert presenting Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Missa Assumpta est as no one has heard it for more than 300 years: intimate, lucid and strikingly immediate.

Charpentier is one of those composers whose works were never set in stone. As maître de musique at the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris from 1698, he did not write for posterity, but for the occasion. And circumstances varied. Sometimes a large ensemble was at his disposal; at other times, only a handful of singers and instrumentalists. Charpentier responded to this with a flexibility that has become unfamiliar to us today: he expanded smaller motets when resources allowed and pared down larger works when circumstances required. We know that the Missa Assumpta est was performed at the Sainte-Chapelle in 1702 with a large festive ensemble. The surviving sources, however, reveal that a lighter version also existed.

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This is precisely the version explored in this concert. Martin Gester, who has long devoted himself to Charpentier’s substantial body of work, follows this trail and directs the programme from the organ. Eight singers enter into dialogue with an ensemble of two flutes, two violins, two viols, a basse de violon, theorbo and organ. Solos and tutti alternate, voices and instruments answering one another. Motets and symphonies devoted to the Assumption of the Virgin frame the Mass, among them the Litanies de la Vierge, in which the music unfolds as a subtle dialogue.