Ovation by a public, surprised and finally conquered

Modernize the old
With Marc-Antoine Charpentier and his younger brother of a (grand) generation Johann Sebastian Bach, the listener knows that, barring an unlikely cataclysm, he will navigate the safe waters, though sometimes surprising of a well-honed aesthetic, a known theme; he is going to watch for the "little nothing" that is the signature of the conductor or the soloist, their audacity to get off the beaten track a thousand times by highlighting opus little played ... Leo Warynski did all this with "his" Metabolites, giving a breathtaking dimension to the Mass of the dead of the French composer, playing contrasts and sound complementarities between different voices, putting into space, almost quadraphonic, the "Transfige dulcissime Jesu" before proposing a very removed reading of the chorale "Aus tiefer Not" from Kantor.
But it is with Philippe Hersant's "Psalm CXXX", composed in 1995, that the music has demonstrated its ability "to abolish both time and centuries", in the words of the choir director, an identical text to that of the chorale that preceded it in the program, the same instrumentarium reduced to the essential with a viola da gamba and the positive organ that weave a more dramatic climate than in Bach to return at times to an interiority "to the Schütz on which the four-voice mixed choir sails as a lord.
The modernity, the news at Hersant, is in its contrasts, its flash of sound, its oppositions between almost silence and large vocal architectures they nestle ... Ovation by a public at first astonished, then surprised and finally conquered. "