HOLY WEEK was quietly and reverently marked in the 1710 Chapelle Royale at Versailles, near Paris, with three works from 18th-century France.
The harmonies of Sébastien de Brossard’s Stabat Mater, a five-part setting of the 13th-century hymn to the Virgin Mary portraying her suffering during Christ’s crucifixion, look back to the Renaissance, while showing the Italianate influence of his contemporaries. The shadow of Allegri hovered over “Vidit suum”. “Eia mater” and “Fac me cruce custodi” were filled with inner joy. The solos were taken by unnamed members of the Chœur de l’Opéra Royal: their anonymity was a pity, because the grave and sincere baritone of “Tui nati vulnerati” was particularly fine.
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s deeply dramatic and insufficiently well-known Le reniement de Saint-Pierre (St Peter’s Denial), setting Latin texts drawn largely from St Matthew’s Gospel, survived because Brossard copied it, and it shares his transitional style. In a format that looks forward to the Passion settings, a narrator — Historicus — tells the story, with a chorus commenting on the action. The soloists immersed themselves in Charpentier’s skilful characterisation: Christ was a dignified and sombre bass, Peter a tenor by turns sycophantic and nervous. In two outstanding moments, the chorus become disciples, vigorously asserting that they will be faithful, with many overlapping cries of “Non te negabimus,” and Malchus and the two servant maids bully Peter, while he weakly bleats his denial.
Finally, the music shifts completely, plunging into a sombre lament obviously influenced by Charpentier’s teacher, Carissimi. The chorus underline the moment at which Peter remembers Christ’s words with a long-drawn out and repeated “Tunc” (“Then”) and dwell with sombre relish on “flevit amare” (wept bitterly), leaving him, and us, facing an abyss.
Of the Holy Week Tenebrae services, we heard the music for the Maundy Thursday Office. The texts for the leçons comes from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, with a long melismas on the Hebrew letters introducing each Latin verse. The sopranos Catherine Trottmann and Ana Vieria Leite were both outstanding in the first and second of François Couperin’s Trois Leçons de Ténèbres pour le Mercredi Saint, pure of voice and shapely of line. The opening of the third lesson, both voices beautifully melismatic around the letter Ioth, was a moment of purest beauty.
Sadly, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish the words, even with the text. The somewhat reverberant acoustic was not to blame, as both soloists and choruses in Bach’s much larger St Matthew Passion the following day were perfectly clear.
Chloé de Guillebon directed, standing, from a chamber organ coupled to a harpsichord, with a real feeling for colour and narrative. Her physical proximity to the singers enabled a shaping of individual words and phrases, ably supported by Claire Gautrot’s warm viola da gamba and Léa Masson and Morgan Marquié on theorbos.
During a Tenebrae service, the candles would gradually be extinguished, leaving the congregation in darkness. Here, groups of electric candles slowly went out — sadly, not to complete blackness. After an uninterrupted hour and a quarter of quiet joy, the audience erupted into its noisy and heartfelt expression.