Gervais: Grands Motets

Amply demonstrating that Charles-Hubert Gervais didn’t just excel in composing operas, György Vashegyi turns his attention to the French Baroque composer’s sacred music, with a new disc of “Grands Motets” containing five extended and sumptuous psalms and hymns, involving soloists, chorus and orchestra. Gervais’ relative modern-day anonymity in this genre can to a large extent be placed at the door of historical circumstance: during the end of the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV he was employed by the king’s younger brother Philippe d’Orléans and continued so during d’Orléans’ Regency and it wasn’t until 1723 that Gervais obtained an official post as one of the four sous-maîtres of the Chapelle du Roi. And then any motet he wrote went straight into the royal library without publication and has required today’s transcribers to create performing editions. Tones of celebration, relief (on Louis XV’s recovery from a nasty illness), solemnity, meditation, a dash of restrained theatricality, bold harmonies and lighter orchestral textures than with Lalande (or Bernier and Campra) provide Vashegyi’s Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra with plenty of scope to demonstrate their collective mastery and experience of the idiom, and they are more than ably assisted by the solo contributions of Olivia Doray, Katalin Szutrély, Cyrille Dubois, Mathias Vidal and David Witczak.