Ensemble ...in Ore mel..., Olivier Vernet - Corrette: Noel 1788 (2007)

Michel Corrette was a French organist and composer with a long and prolific career. The two works here were composed 47 years apart, and the earlier Nouveau Livre de Noëls is not even an especially early work of this little-known composer. Despite the time difference, they don't differ sharply in style. The Messe pour le temps de Noël, composed in 1788, shows few traces of Classical-period opera or even of the late Baroque Italian vocal style, even though Corrette wrote a pedagogical work instructing his readers in the fine points of Italian music. The French style was simply extraordinarily persistent. What keeps these pieces from sounding like Rameau is their simplicity. The Mass, featuring organ and a pair of high voices, is mostly broken up into short chunks with diatonic tunes and dance-like rhythms, and the Nouveau Livre de Noëls, for organ, is full of small pastoral pieces that are charmingly artless even if two full CDs of this music tend to wear on the general listener after awhile. The real attraction here is for organists; Olivier Vernet plays a 1750 instrument from Strasbourg that's both powerful and subtle in its various voices, and the whole is beautifully recorded. Recommended for those with a serious interest in organ music or the music of France in the 18th century. Notes are in French only.