Lux: Recitar cantando alla francese

At the turn of the seventeenth century, recitar cantando did not merely announce a new vocal manner; it altered the rhetorical compact between music and language. The singer was asked, in Jacopo Peri’s memorable formulation, to ‘imitate in song one who speaks’: to recover, within measured sound, the pressure, hesitation, cadence and inward temperature of utterance itself. Monteverdi’s seconda pratica gave this ambition its most consequential form, for here the words were to be the mistress of harmony rather than its servant – or, as he put it, ‘l’Armonia si fa umile ancella dell’Oratione’. Harmony becomes the humble handmaid of discourse; the verbal image, the accent and even the silence between words determine musical time.

LUX takes this principle as its point of departure, yet follows it into a repertory in which its presence is less obvious and therefore more beguiling. Its subtitle, Recitar cantando alla francese, is no rigid designation of genre, nor does it imply that every work is recitative in any literal sense. It proposes, rather, a way of listening. What happens when an art born of the madrigal and nascent theatre enters the motet, where the word is not the speech of a mythological character but Scripture, prayer, proclamation? The result is no diminution of drama. A solo voice may emerge from the choir as though from a crowd; a phrase may acquire the urgency of direct address; repetition may cease to be ornament and become insistence; several voices may assume the parts of messenger, witness and believing community. The sacred action is recounted, but it is also made present.

What crossed the Alps, then, was not a style preserved intact, but a question: by what means might music disclose the living act within the written word? In France, between the courtly inheritance of Henri III and the ceremonial world of Louis XIV, the Italian answer entered into marriage with native declamation, measured ornament, dance-bred poise and that fullness of sonority in which splendour is held within proportion. The grandeur of court and chapel did not suppress the intimacy of recitar cantando; it enlarged its theatre. Thus the frailty of one voice above a basso continuo and the regal amplitude of a many-voiced choir became two degrees of the same eloquence, private prayer opening upon public revelation.

The composers gathered here allow that history to be heard across more than a century. Philippe de Monte – Flemish by birth, formed by Italy and long active at the imperial courts of Vienna and Prague – stands at the Renaissance threshold, where Franco-Flemish counterpoint had already absorbed the expressive intelligence of the madrigal. Guillaume Bouzignac makes sacred polyphony behave like theatre: dialogues, abrupt changes of perspective and vividly pictured words seem to place the listener amongst the witnesses of the event. Étienne Moulinié brings to Christian texts something of the suppleness and finely judged accent of the air de cour, whilst the continuo lends speech a new harmonic immediacy. In Henry Du Mont’s Cantica sacra of 1652, northern contrapuntal learning, Italian concertato procedures and French melodic lucidity meet in a collection decisive for the emergence of the petit motet. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, whose Roman formation brought him within the orbit of Carissimi, endowed this union of goûts with an unsurpassed dramatic intelligence; and Sébastien de Brossard – priest, theorist, composer and indefatigable collector – inherited the same dialogue between nations, tempering Italian ardour with French decorum without depriving either of its power to astonish.

Historical plurality is made, in LUX, to serve a single design. The album is not a cabinet of finely wrought miniatures, but a spiritual itinerary articulated in four stations – Conception, Nativity, Adoration and Grace – whose succession possesses something of the narrative force of a sacred oratorio. There is no narrator standing outside the action: one motet interprets the next, and the sequence itself assumes the office of dramaturgy. Many hands tell one story, from Mary’s conception to the star, from the gladness of the birth to the sorrow of the Passion already foreshadowed within it. By excluding the familiar treasury of Christmas pieces, the programme resists both seasonal picturesque effect and the consolations of recognition. What remains is an art cycle for any time: a meditation upon manifestation, mortality and grace.

The first station begins in the intimate compass of Charpentier’s Conceptio tua, where two voices and continuo cause doctrinal celebration to sound like an immediate exchange. Roberday’s sixth Fugue and Caprice then withdraws the word, though not its memory: contrapuntal thought creates a threshold before Bouzignac’s Ave Maria, in which personal salutation is gathered into four-part choral utterance. Such instrumental pieces are not decorative intervals between the ‘events’ of the album. Roberday’s Fugues et caprices of 1660, conceived in open score and hospitable to instrumental participation, bear witness to the same circulation of ideas as the vocal music, their subjects and models connecting Paris with Frescobaldi, Froberger, Cavalli and the imperial sphere. In the encounter between organ and viola da gamba, narrative time is suspended so that contemplation may deepen it.

Nativity opens, paradoxically, in stillness. Bouzignac’s Dum silentium teneret omnia makes the silence of all things the very condition of the Word’s descent: a theological mystery becomes a poetics of Baroque sound, for music is born at the edge of what is not sounded. With Moulinié’s Flores apparuerunt, manifestation assumes the likeness of blossoming; in Brossard’s O miraculum!, it becomes wonder voiced by distinct persons, as though astonishment itself required more than one countenance. D’Anglebert’s Fugue gathers that wonder into a wordless interior before Du Mont’s expansive Christus natus est. Here the alternation of recurring choral proclamation and solo verses allows knowledge to pass continually between person and community. The announcement is heard, answered and returned enlarged: what one voice has encountered becomes the possession of all.

In the third station, sight sets the drama in motion. Bouzignac’s Stella refulget and Moulinié’s Magi videntes stellam do more than contemplate a light in the heavens; to behold the star is already to depart, to seek and, ultimately, to offer. Yet LUX declines to leave the Incarnation in a radiance without shadow. Du Mont’s Media vita in morte sumus bends the gaze from the crib towards human finitude – ‘in the midst of life we are in death’ – and thereby reveals that the gift of a body contains the possibility of its sacrifice. Following Roberday’s first Fugue and Caprice, Brossard’s Ave verum corpus recognises in the newly incarnate flesh the Eucharistic body, wounded and given. The Passion is not appended to Christmas as a later sorrow; it is disclosed as the inward gravity of the Nativity itself.

Grace is therefore neither an escape from mortality nor an easy resolution of it, but its conversion into praise. Du Mont’s Cantate Domino restores movement and communal breath; Louis Couperin’s Fantaisie opens a final chamber of reflection, where the absence of words becomes a form of expectancy. Thereafter Philippe de Monte’s Benedictio et claritas enlarges the field into twelve-voice polyphony: three choirs make blessing, glory, wisdom and thanksgiving not merely ideas to be named, but an architecture to be inhabited. Charpentier’s Laudate Dominum brings the journey to its close through living exchange amongst soloists, four-part chorus and continuo. The passage from one voice to many, and from the multitude back to articulate persons, is essential to the album’s conception. Sacred community does not efface the individual utterance; it receives, answers and magnifies it.

Baroque sacred music is frequently described by means of its contrasts – monody and counterpoint, intimacy and magnificence, flesh and spirit, darkness and light. LUX suggests that these are not so much oppositions as acts of conversion. The solitary voice bears within it the remembrance of the choir, whilst the choir, however opulent its sonority, remains answerable to the intelligibility of the word. Contrapuntal multiplicity may become dramatic action; recitation may unfold into architecture; even silence is not the negation of music, but the invisible ground from which the Word becomes audible. The ‘Baroque’ resides perhaps in this restless passage from one condition into another: in the refusal to regard appearance as superficial, since what appears may be precisely that through which the invisible declares itself.

Hence the almost cinematic quality of this sequence, achieved without scenery and without any surrender to the merely illustrative. Its changes of texture and vocal distance create something akin to close-up and panorama, private address and public vision; the sections for solo voices give way to polyphonic tableaux in which the same episode appears from several points of hearing at once. Yet the true theatre remains inward. That which is represented before the listener is also enacted within the listener, as narrative becomes meditation and musical splendour a means of spiritual elevation. Light, in this sense, is neither an object nor simply a favoured emblem of Baroque art. It is an event of perception: something becomes manifest and, in manifesting itself, alters the one who beholds it.

LUX is the immediacy of that epiphany – an apparition which need not explain either its arising or its musical radiance. It asks only to be heard as light is seen: all at once.