French Sacred Music - Schola Cantorum of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin

Petit Orgue: George Novak 
Grand Orgue: McNeil Robinson 

Viols: Wendy Gillespie, Pamela Crane

Vielles: Louise Schulman, Wendy Gillespie, Lucy Cross 

Schola Cantorum of the 
Church of St. Mary the Virgin 

McNeil Robinson, 
Music Director and Conductor

In most manuscripts containing Mass movements that survive from the fourteenth century, the pieces are not grouped as complete Mass cycles, but classified under their separate headings, Kyries, Glorias, Credos, etc. In four manuscripts, however, one in the cathedral library at Tournai, one in Toulouse, one at the University of the Sorbonne, and one Barcelona, several different movements appear together, seemingly for performance at one celebration of the Mass. The separate movements of these "Masses," however, demonstrate no compositional unity among themselves, and very little melodic, harmonic, or even stylistic consistency. They cannot be regarded as "cycles." 

Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1634-1704) as a pupil of Giacomo Carissimi, the great Roman composer of Latin oratorios of the mid-seventeenth century. In France, Charpentier  very successfully adapted this popular form to French taste, although no later composers seem to have followed in turn in his footsteps. The Mass for Easter Saturday is a much less ambitious composition than a full oratorio, but it gives us an interesting focus on the eclectic nature of late seventeenth-century musical style.