Art Choral, Vol. 8: Quebec

Description

Art Choral, Vol. 8: Quebec offers a true journey through more than four centuries of Quebec choral music. Rather than presenting this heritage as something static, the album creates a dialogue between the earliest music to arrive in New France, the oral tradition, and contemporary compositions. The program begins at the very origins with two 17th-century French masses by Henri Fremart and Artus Aux-Cousteaux, whose scores bear witness to the repertoire that was circulating in Quebec from the colony's earliest days. It then explores popular memory with "A la claire fontaine," "Quand j'etais chez mon pere," and "Isabeau s'y promene," reimagined in arrangements by Jean-Francois Daignault, before moving on to modern and contemporary works by Claude Vivier, William Kraushaar, Maurice-Gaston Du Berger, and Matthias Maute. Performed by the twelve voices of the ArtChoral Ensemble under the direction of Matthias Maute, *Quebec* is less an anthology than a musical portrait: that of a choral culture which, for over 400 years, has absorbed, passed on, and transformed its heritage.