Le Concert Spirituel

Le Concert Spirituel is a French ensemble performing Baroque music on period instruments. Founded in 1987 by conductor Hervé Niquet, it takes its name from the 18th-century concert society Concert Spirituel, which ceased operations during the French Revolution. Performing instrumental, choral and operatic music, with a repertoire focused on the music played at the court of Versailles, the ensemble collaborates with the Centre de musique baroque for the most accurate transcriptions, based on original scores and documents from the archives. While Le Concert Spirituel's repertoire has given pride of place to works by Lully, Charpentier, Campra and Rameau, revealing previously unpublished or forgotten compositions, it has also brought to light many lesser-known composers such as Geoffroy, Boismortier, Destouches, Quinault, Clérambault, Desmarest and others. He has also extended it to Handel, Purcell, Gluck, Mozart, Salieri, Vivaldi, Monteverdi and Striggio, as well as to 19th and 20th century composers such as Saint-Saëns, Lecocq, Messager, Cherubini, Grétry, Berlioz, Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré and Gounod. Since its inception, Le Concert Spirituel has given numerous concerts, toured extensively and won worldwide acclaim for its recordings (nearly a hundred), including the Grands Motets by Rameau and Lully, the Messe des morts, the Te Deum, Charpentier's Motets and Leçons de Ténèbres, Rameau's opera Pigmalion (1999), Boismortier's Daphnis et Chloé (2002), Campra's Requiem (2002), Purcell's Didon and Aeneas (2001) and King Arthur (2004), Marais' Sémélé (2007), Lully's Proserpine (2009), Vivaldi's Gloria & Magnificat ( 2008), Vivaldi's Messe des morts and Te Deum (2008) and Lully's Leçons de Ténèbres (2009). Magnificat (2015), Lully's Persée 1770 (2017) and Armide 1778 (2020), Handel's Messiah 1754 (2017), Berlioz's Messe solenelle (2019), Requiem pour Louis XIV (2020), Mozart's The Magic Flute (2021), Saint-Saëns' Phryné (2022), Handel's Coronation Anthems (2022), Salieri and Mozart's Requiems (2022), Charpentier's Médée (2024), Desmarest and Campra's Iphigénie en Tauride (2025) and Handel's Israel in Egypt (2025).

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