SANCTUS!
Saints in Parisian polyphony
in the 13th century
Released: 2014
1 Gaudens in domino Anonymous
2 Petre amas me Léonin
3 Pater sancte Anonymous
4 Kyrie summe rex Anonymous
5 Sanctus perpetuo Anonyme
6 Preciosus Anonymous
7 Regi regum Anonymous
8 Sederunt omnes Pérotin
Listen
The crowd of saints, humble or prestigious, haunts our Middle Ages. It populates the daily life of women and men, in the home, in the street and of course in the church. At Notre-Dame de Paris, the greatest saints are celebrated with extraordinary songs that will astonish all of Christian Europe. Pérotin and the clerks of the cathedral invent new polyphonic styles giving a spectacular impetus to musical creation around the 1200s.
The “machicots”, virtuoso solo singers, give free rein to their talents in these songs that are powerfully anchored in the Gothic architecture that gave birth to them. Étienne, Denis and Guillaume de Bourges, famous preacher sanctified a few years after his death in 1209 and who very probably knew the Parisian clerical composers, come back to life through these impressive organa and conduits. The Diabolus in Musica ensemble revisits the School of Notre-Dame with the personality of its earthy, warm and powerful voices.
Distribution
Tenors: Raphaël Boulay - Olivier Germond
Bass-baritones: Geoffroy Buffière - Christophe Grapperon - Emmanuel Vistorky
Basses: Frédéric Bourreau - Philippe Roche
Harp, percussion: Antoine Guerber
Recorded at Fontevraud Abbey from March 26 to 31, 2013
Sound recording, editing: Jean Marc Laisné
Newspaper
"Diabolus in Musica propels us into a universe that is both intellectual and sensual [...] The singers do not seek to erase the rough edges of a polyphony with dissonances that are very disconcerting for our modern ears: by inscribing them in a dense and granitic, finding their right "timing" in the wide deployment of sound, they hollow out their relief without hitting us. Listening to them, we feel all the roughness of the stone of the buildings where these sound monuments resounded seven centuries ago."
Océanne Boudeau - Diapason magazine, February 2015
"So here is a completely successful record which fits without fading into the wake of those which preceded it and confirms, if need be, the validity of the work of Diabolus in Musica in the field of the sacred medieval repertoire."
Jean-Christophe Pucek - Past of the arts, October 2014