Featured Album December 2025: Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists "Charpentier: Baroque Christmas"

As the end of the year draws ever closer, it's time to enjoy some festive music and what better than a new release by the celebrated Monteverdi Choir performing a programme of Charpentier's music blending carols and sacred text for Noël. Their second release of the year (both of which have been selected for our Featured Album series), this time with the English Baroque Soloists and conductor Christophe Rousset, this is a fitting way to round off another excellent year of early music releases. Read on to find out more about this release and order your copy for the big day...

Charpentier: Baroque Christmas
Monteverdi Choir & English Baroque Soloists

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR DECEMBER 2025

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From the artist's press release:

Recorded in December 2024, this release marks the debut of renowned French conductor Christophe Rousset with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. The album ‘Baroque Christmas’ featuring the music of Charpentier includes the Messe de Minuit with its beguiling blend of sacred music and French folk carols, as well as In nativitatem Domini Canticum, and the Noëls sur les instruments.

Track Listing:

Charpentier	Noëls sur les instruments, H. 534 & H. 531 (selections)
Charpentier	Messe de minuit pour Noël, H. 9
Charpentier	In nativitatem Domini canticum, H. 416

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Charpentier: Baroque Christmas":

For Christmas, the German-speaking world has Bach, notably (but not exclusively) the Christmas Oratorio; the English have Handel’s Messiah, though, of course, in Handel’s lifetime Messiah was a Lententide work, the attachment to the festive season coming later; and the French…? Well, they have the delights of Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704), one of the most significant musicians of late seventeenth-century France, despite his being inhibited from attaining a permanent post at Louis XIV’s court due to the malevolent influence of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), who was down on Italian music in general and French composers who has studied in Italy. Charpentier adored the dramatic style of Italian liturgical music, and emulated it in many of his own sacred works; moreover, he had studied in Rome with Carissimi. While Lully held the reins of musical power, Charpentier was never going to hold a lucrative position at court. From 1687 and Lully’s demise, Charpentier held roles at the most important Jesuit Church in Paris and lastly at the Dauphin’s Sainte-Chapelle.

This attractive CD devoted to Charpentier’s Christmas music begins with the most important of his four settings of In navitatem Dominum canticum, essentially a dramatic sacred piece conveying Jesus’ birth and the adoration of the shepherds. Falling into two parts, the first concerns God’s people awaiting the Messiah’s coming (Old Testament texts, C minor tonality), while the second (New Testament, C major tonality) relates the Jesus’s arrival and the shepherds’ perspective on events.

Conductor Christoph Rousset, well-versed in this repertoire, here makes his recording debut with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, having performed the programme live on tour in 2024. His expertise in this repertoire pays dividends, and his forces (soloists are all drawn from the choir) respond warmly to his direction. The instrumental playing is captivating, not least because of Charpentier’s many expressive orchestral effects, which include one of the earliest deployments of muted strings.

The other main work is Charpentier’s better known Messe de Minuit pour Noël, composed around 1694 for the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis, Paris, specifically for the service of Midnight Mass. Charpentier took traditional French Christmas carols (the liner notes detail the sources) and reset them using the Latin texts of the mass. The result is a delightful synthesis of styles (French and Italian), and a combination of the sacred and the secular. Rousset’s rendition is charming, his attention to detail exemplary, and Charpentier’s music, from more than three centuries ago, works its magic.

As a supplement to the main works, Rousset gives us eight numbers from the two groups of Noëls sur les instruments from the 1690s, instrumental settings of French carols, many of which appear in the Messe de Minuit. Without the voices, we can here relish the stylish playing of the English Baroque Soloists: these setting may be ‘simple’ but the players deliver them with a high level of artistry.

This festive season why not give the Bach and Handel warhorses a miss, and savour the more unstated atmosphere of Charpentier’s gentle Baroque Christmas on offer in this recording. You won’t be disappointed.

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Charpentier: Baroque Christmas is available from The Early Music Shop online or in-store at our Snape Maltings showroom!

Click here to order now!

Click here to watch the album trailer from the Monteverdi Choir including excerpts of the festive music featured on the disc: