Louis XIII - Ballet de la Merlaison (Vinyl rip)

Marc-Antoine Charpentier:
Messe pour Plusieurs Instruments au Lieu des Orgues

10 tracks - MP3 192 Kbps - RAR 66Mb


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"The next day, nothing was talked of in Paris but the ball that the Officials of the City were giving for the King and Queen, and in which Their Majesties were to dance the famous Ballet de la Merlaison, which was the favourite ballet of the King... Twenty violins had been commanded... The King... was in a hunting costume of the greatest elegance and Monsieur and the other nobles were similarly attired. The ballet lasted an hour, it contained sixteen entrées."
Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers, chapter 22.

In Dumas works, as always, fiction and truth walk side by side. In fact the Ballet de la Merlaison was not only Louis XIII preferred ballet, but his own creation, as reported by Theophraste Renaudot, the inventor of periodical journalism, in the special issue of the Gazette de France for March 22, 1635.

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The "Mass for Instruments in place of the Organ" by Marc-Antoine Charpentier offers considerable interest on a number of grounds: liturgy, scoring, disposition of instruments and compositional procedures, even without taking into account the bold inspiration of the former disciple of Carissimi.

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All in all I believe this record is worth a try, even if the performance is not astounding.