Couperin : Leçons De Ténèbres

HOLY WEEK François Couperin (1668-1733) Leçons de Ténèbres Wednesday 24 March, 9pm – candlelit concert Chapelle Royale Duration: 1h15 without interval Around the middle of the 17th century, the Leçons de Ténèbres became the subject of increasingly admired musical compositions.

Michel Lambert was the first in France to compose a cycle of them, in 1662, quickly followed by Charpentier and Lalande. But the most famous, and the first to regain acclaim on record and with the wider public today, are those of François Couperin, dated 1714.

At the close of Louis XIV's reign, France was a land of piety, but also of Italianism in music, including religious music. Accordingly, the emotions Couperin composed for his singers are so dramatic that one might believe them drawn from opera...

Vocal artistry and spirituality are combined here with great skill, bearing witness to the refinement of the French art of singing, practised as much in salons and theatres as in places of worship.

In the Parisian convents, people crowded in to hear these divine voices intoning the Leçons for the days of Holy Week: faceless voices of young cloistered nuns, voices from heaven... but often singers from the opera when the theatres were closed in times of penitence!

The candles were traditionally extinguished one by one as the office of Ténèbres unfolded, ending in the darkness of night... The three surviving Leçons by François Couperin were written for Holy Wednesday.

They represent one of the peaks of French sacred art at the beginning of the 18th century.

Marie Perbost and Sarah Charles, leading lights of the young generation of sopranos, revive this musical miracle under the direction of Chloé de Guillebon, in the growing night as the candles go out, one by one...