Du Mont: Motets & Élévations for the Chapel of Louis XIV

For 20 years (from 1663 to 1683) Henry Du Mont directed the music of the Sun King’s chapel. For the daily Mass there he built up a new repertory consisting of motets for full chorus and more intimate pieces for solo voices. The former aimed to transpose to the context of ‘ordinary’ the format of the large-scale works conceived for extraordinary ceremonies. Sébastien Daucé presents an innovative approach to these grands motets, that at once links specific musical features with historical data, for each of which he adopts a specific instrumental scoring.