La Nébuleuse / Gabriel Rignol

Cast: 16 artists (8 singers - 2 viola da gamba - 2 recorders - 1 bass violin - 1 bass viol - organ - theorbo)

Conceived and created around Marc-Antoine Charpentier's ‘Voyage de Rome’, this programme retraces the illustrious French composer's training in Italy. In particular, he studied writing for 6 vocal parts, an extremely rare form of writing at the time in both Italy and France.

None other than Claudio Monteverdi was one of the first composers to try his hand at this very special form, when he set to music a magnificent poem by Petrarch (Or che'l Ciel). Domenico Mazzocchi and Giacomo Carissimi followed in his footsteps, the former in his opera ‘La Catena d'Adone’ and the latter in his oratorio ‘Jephté’. When Marc-Antoine Charpentier went to Italy in 1665 to study with these two masters, the trip to Rome - a tradition for all artists in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - had fallen into disuse. Throughout his life, his Italianate style earned him as many detractors as admirers.