Couperin: Leçons de Ténèbres; Gesualdo: Tenebrae Responsories for Maundy Thursday (2020)

performed by David de Winter (vocals), Gabriel Crouch (vocals), Grace Davidson (soprano), Grace Davidson (vocals), Jeremy Budd (vocals), Jimmy Holliday (vocals), Jonathan Rees (viola da gamba), Julia Doyle (vocals), Julia Doyle (soprano), Steven Devine (organ)
composed by Carlo Gesualdo, François Couperin

The dividing line between historical performances of Renaissance and Baroque music is fairly sharp, as is the expertise required in each field. One rarely hears Bach and Josquin performed together, despite a certain easy density of polyphony common to both, but the small choir Tenebrae and director Nigel Short break the rule here, with striking results. The group has recorded settings of the Maundy Thursday musical Office for which it is named several times: the "Tenebrae," perhaps named for the darkness that followed the ... Read More

The dividing line between historical performances of Renaissance and Baroque music is fairly sharp, as is the expertise required in each field. One rarely hears Bach and Josquin performed together, despite a certain easy density of polyphony common to both, but the small choir Tenebrae and director Nigel Short break the rule here, with striking results. The group has recorded settings of the Maundy Thursday musical Office for which it is named several times: the "Tenebrae," perhaps named for the darkness that followed the extinguishing of a series of candles, has called forth moody, atmospheric settings down through the ages, and it's ideal for an experiment of this kind. Short and Tenebrae, who have already recorded other settings of these texts, pair the three Leçons de Ténèbres of François Couperin -- surviving sections of a mostly lost set written for the aging Louis XIV and published in the early 1710s -- with the Tenebrae Responsories of Carlo Gesualdo. They're very different works: the Couperin... Read Less