Hervé Niquet, the conductor who has recorded so many of the grand motets of the Grand Siècle -- those choral-orchestral works by Lully, Rameau, Campra, and Charpentier that stand with the cantatas of Bach and the anthems of Handel as the great sacred works of the Baroque -- turns here to three works by Henry Desmarets that were, in their time, quite scandalous. They were not, of course, scandalous in the sense that they were musically outlandish -- indeed, they are quite as beautiful as the best works in the genre -- but ...
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Hervé Niquet, the conductor who has recorded so many of the grand motets of the Grand Siècle -- those choral-orchestral works by Lully, Rameau, Campra, and Charpentier that stand with the cantatas of Bach and the anthems of Handel as the great sacred works of the Baroque -- turns here to three works by Henry Desmarets that were, in their time, quite scandalous. They were not, of course, scandalous in the sense that they were musically outlandish -- indeed, they are quite as beautiful as the best works in the genre -- but because, inadvertently, they made a fool of Louis XIV. Rejected as a composer by the Sun King, Desmarets was hired by the composer who did get the job to write these motets to pass off as his own. They were premiered successfully at Versailles, but when his employer refused to pay him, Desmarets revealed the scheme to the King. Louis was not amused: he fired the pretender but instead of replacing him with Desmarets, he replaced him with Lalande, a composer whose retiring nature made...
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