Charpentier: Judith and Massacre des Innocents – Schneebeli

Herod’s soldiers arrive in this recording sounding genuinely dangerous — low voices massed and snarling, the kind of sound that makes you sit up in your chair even if you’ve heard the piece a dozen times. That’s the test of any Caedes Sanctorum Innocentium, really: whether the massacre chorus chills you or just passes by as decorous period entertainment. Olivier Schneebeli’s forces from the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles pass the test handily.

Charpentier remains, eccentrically, an underdog composer even after four decades of revival. Everyone knows the name. Fewer know the music beyond the “Te Deum” prelude that public television plays before every Eurovision-adjacent broadcast (that little trumpet tune has done more for his reputation, and obscured more of his actual achievement, than anything else he wrote). The real Charpentier — the dramatist frozen out of the Paris Opéra by Lully’s monopoly, forced to sublimate his theatrical instincts into music for Molière’s troupe and, later, into sacred works for Mademoiselle de Guise’s private chapel — is a different and much stranger figure. Denied the stage, he built miniature operas inside the liturgy. The histoire sacrée was his loophole.

He’d absorbed Carissimi in Rome, whether or not the old man ever formally taught him — the influence is unmistakable in the choral antiphony, the vivid text-painting, the willingness to let a narrator (the historicus, borrowed straight from the Roman oratorio tradition) carry the action forward in quasi-recitative before the drama erupts into ensemble. Jephte is the obvious Carissimi model for the “Judith” plot’s atmosphere of righteous violence and female heroism; Charpentier had clearly memorized its lessons and then pushed past them, toward something more harmonically restless and, frankly, more Gallic in its sensitivity to text declamation.

Judith sive Bethulia liberata gets the lion’s share of space here — nearly forty-two minutes — and Dagmar Sasková sings the title role with a bright, penetrating, slightly steely soprano that suits Judith’s resolve better than it might suit her seductiveness. This is a fine dramatic instinct on Sasková’s part, actually: too many singers play up the femme fatale angle and lose the character’s terrifying religious conviction, the sense that she believes herself an instrument of Yahweh rather than merely an assassin in eyeliner. Erwin Aros’s haute-contre is reedy and focused, occasionally strained at the top but never ugly about it. Jean-François Novelli’s tenor has the narrative authority the historicus role wants — he doesn’t over-act the text, lets Charpentier’s harmonic surprises do the dramatic work, which is exactly right.

The shorter Caedes is, structurally, the more audacious piece on the disc. Seventeen minutes, and it does more with contrast than most full-length oratorios manage in an hour. That opening angelic warning to Joseph — “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee into Egypt” — is set with a hushed, almost embarrassed tenderness; then the historicus intones the “Vox in Rama” passage (Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted — Jeremiah’s line filtered through Matthew, and set by nearly every composer from Poulenc backward who ever wanted to make an audience uncomfortable) and the mood curdles fast. The mothers’ chorus, scored high, keens against the soldiers’ chorus scored low — a genuinely brutal antiphonal effect, and Schneebeli doesn’t soften it. Good. Too many “authentic” French Baroque recordings sand the edges off Charpentier’s more violent instincts in the name of elegance. This one doesn’t.

Les Pages, les Chantres, les Symphonistes — the whole apparatus of period-instrument forces trained specifically in this repertoire under the Versailles center’s decades-long project — bring a sound that’s lean without being thin, and the boy trebles (some of these singers are genuinely young, not just youthful-sounding adults) add an unforced purity to the upper choral lines that a fully adult ensemble simply cannot replicate. You hear it particularly in the massacre chorus: there’s something almost unbearable about hearing children’s voices, however metaphorically, cry out against violence done to children.

Where does this leave the release against its rivals? René Jacobs’s older account of Charpentier’s histoires sacrées set a high bar for dramatic pointing, if with a somewhat plusher, more operatic sound; William Christie’s Arts Florissants recordings of Charpentier remain touchstones for idiomatic French declamation, even decades on. Schneebeli’s version doesn’t unseat either, quite — the engineering is a shade recessed, and Aros’s upper register occasionally thins out under pressure — but the coupling here is smart, the scholarship (inevitable, given the source) impeccable, and the total impression is of a reading that trusts Charpentier’s dramatic instincts rather than dressing them up in false Baroque politesse. That trust pays off. Recommended, with modest reservations, to anyone still under the impression that this composer wrote nothing but one famous fanfare.