This concert proposes to (re)discover two contrasting Masses heard in France during the reigns of Louis XVI and of Napoleon. Composed by Mozart in 1791 on his deathbed at the behest of a mysterious character, his Requiem was triumphantly performed in Paris for the first time in 1804 in a slightly modified version conducted by Luigi Cherubini. To open our concert, we will perform the latter’s Marche funèbre (Funeral March) of 1820 for large orchestra, reminiscent in its dramatic weight of his colleague François-Joseph Gossec’s Marche lugubre for wind band and percussion composed thirty years earlier, which we will also perform. François Giroust, the last representative of the French grand motet, as you will hear in his moving Super flumina Babylonis of 1768, was commissioned to compose the music of the coronation mass for Louis XVI in 1775 at Reims Cathedral.

In collaboration with Arion Baroque Orchestra