Hervé Niquet revisits the gloriously rich world of 17th-century French sacred music with his musicians from Le Concert Spirituel, bringing our attention to Louis Le Prince. A barely known composer, he worked in Lisieux in Lower Normandy. Niquet intersperses the maître de chapelle’s 'Missa Macula non est in te' with a mighty handful of motets by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.

Mass and motets are given in versions for female voices and instruments. Whilst some of the pieces sung here were written specifically for high voices, it was a regular practice in the Baroque era to perform polyphonic masses with forces locally available and, thus, convents could well have sung Le Prince’s six-part mass – a homage to the Virgin Mary – making use of female singers. This practice is outlined by Fannie Vernaz in her accompanying booklet article and follows in the line of Hervé Niquet’s exploration of the Requiem Mass by Pierre Bouteiller (a work which he adapted for a choir consisting only of male voices).

The gorgeous sonorities of Charpentier’s motets (and a petit motet by Jean-Baptiste Lully) contribute to an Office constructed by Hervé Niquet around the Ordinary of the Mass by Louis Le Prince, to demonstrate with great clarity the variety of the musical glories of Louis XIV’s grand siècle.