United States Charpentier: Emmanuelle de Negri, (soprano), Bastien Rimondi (high tenor), Alex Rosen (bass), Chorus and Orchestra of Les Arts Florissants / William Christie (conductor). Brooklyn Academy Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, 7.12.2025. (ES-S)
Charpentier –Pastorale sur la Naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, H.483 ; Messe de minuit à 4 voix, flûtes et violons, pour Noël, H.9
Les Arts Florissants’s return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music under William Christie for three early-December performances offered a rare chance to encounter two of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s most evocative Christmas works in a venue and interpretive context that highlighted both their devotional scale and their gentle, pastoral radiance. The concerts also served as a reminder that Christie and his ensemble launched their brilliant international career in the early 1980s by reviving Charpentier’s œuvre and returning the composer to the center of the French Baroque canon. The pairing of Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit pour Noël with his Pastorale sur la Naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ created not merely a seasonal program but a vivid demonstration of how deeply the composer wove together the popular and the sacred at a moment when Christmas traditions, liturgical practice and theatrical sensibility overlapped far more freely than they do today.
The Pastorale sur la Naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ opened the concert, drawing the audience into an intimate narrative sphere shaped by the refined idiom nurtured at the Hôtel de Guise, the Paris residence of Marie de Lorraine, Charpentier’s most important patron. Her independent musical establishment, maintained apart from the royal court, enabled him to cultivate a style unconstrained by Lully’s monopoly. Christie drew out the work’s theatrical suppleness without overstating its rustic elements. In the Pastorale, the narration of the Nativity unfolded with a subdued, unaffected tenderness, conveyed through an ensemble sound that favored directness instead of theatrical color.
Christie shaped the pacing with notable sensitivity: the more contemplative episodes were given room to breathe, while the moments of jubilation carried a soft glow rather than overt exuberance. The dialogues between shepherds and angels unfolded with a lightly inflected lyricism that emphasized line and clarity over external characterization. The shepherds’ opening pleas were delivered with clear diction and a softened tonal palette, the chorus answering gently. By contrast, the angelic interventions carried a poised simplicity, lightly ornamented and without pushing toward operatic declamation. The recorders and viols contributed an understated nocturnal color, tracing lines that evoked atmosphere without tipping into illustration. In the central march toward Bethlehem, Christie found just the right degree of rhythmic lift – enough to animate the music but not to disrupt its devotional contour. The final scenes, in which the shepherds contemplate the newborn child, were shaped with a gentle expansion of tone, the ensemble sustaining the sense that revelation here operates less through dramatic contrast than through an accumulation of finely judged expressive detail. That same modesty of expression would also return in the evening’s two brief encores, pastoral in spirit and offered with comparable restraint.
The second half of the program turned to Messe de Minuit, composed around 1694, a work long admired for the ingenuity with which Charpentier grafts familiar Christmas carols onto the structure of the Mass. Some of these tunes were secular in origin, yet they were long embedded in worship traditions, and Charpentier treats them not as curiosities but as musical building blocks capable of supporting expressive counterpoint and diaphanous textures. Christie and his musicians brought this dual nature into clear focus, approaching the score with a restraint and clarity that allowed melodies such as ‘Joseph est bien marié’ in the Kyrie and ‘Une jeune pucelle’ later in the Mass to emerge with natural warmth, without slipping into overt folkloric borrowings. Tempi throughout the Mass were measured and unhurried, never static but always leaving space for the polyphony to settle and resonate.
The choir sang with focus and warmth, bright at the top yet anchored by a firm but never weighty bass line. Solo verses unfolded with speech-like naturalness, the singers shaping text and line with understated rhetorical precision rather than theatrical inflection. Charpentier’s writing often places two sopranos or a trio of low voices in close dialogue with the chorus, and each line was delivered with lucidity and a lightly expressive touch. Choristers frequently stepped forward as soloists, doing so with remarkable poise, consistency and an instinctive ability to integrate with both voices and instruments. Only three of them – the radiant and precise soprano Emmanuelle de Negri, the agile high tenor Bastien Rimondi and the warmly resonant bass Alex Rosen – were listed in the program booklet. Yet several others, including soprano Virginie Thomas, contributed notable, finely etched interventions.
The instrumental ensemble, particularly the recorders, viols and continuo, provided a delicately colored foundation that enhanced the music’s devotional atmosphere without slipping into pictorial illustration. In the Gloria and Credo, Christie resisted the temptation to inflate the music into ceremonial grandeur; instead, rhythmic buoyancy and modest dynamic shading carried the movements forward. Even in the more extroverted passages, Christie kept the emphasis on simplicity and proportion. His interpretive stance underscored the humility at the heart of the work: Messe de Minuit does not seek to astonish but to illuminate, radiating an understated, communal joy rooted in simplicity of means and generosity of spirit.
Above all, the performance conveyed a striking sense of authenticity – not as an exercise in historical reconstruction but as a direct engagement with Charpentier’s expressive world. Christie and his musicians resisted any impulse toward over-polishing; nothing was smoothed into a generalized modern ‘sheen’, and the music’s humility, ritual framing and gentle theatricality coexisted without contradiction. That balance gave the evening its particular resonance: a feeling at once rooted in tradition and quietly alive to the present, reminding the audience that these works retain their power not through spectacle but through the clarity, warmth and sincerity of their telling.
Edward Sava-Segal
Featured Image: William Christie conducting Les Arts Florissants at BAM © Richard Termine