Sébastien Daucé

The sacred music of the French Baroque has largely lacked champions of the sort that have revivified Italian Baroque performance, but the work of conductor, keyboardist, and musicologist Sébastien Daucé is changing that situation. Working with his handpicked Ensemble Correspondances, Daucé has especially emphasized the rediscovery of the choral music of Marc-Antoine Charpentier and related composers. The first Ensemble Correspondances recording, O Maria! Psaumes et Motets Marc-Antoine Charpentier appeared in 2010. The group has recorded music by Antoine Boësset, Michel Richard de Lalande, Henri du Mont, and Etienne Moulinié, most of it all but unknown, yet of central importance in the later years of what is rightly known as the Grand Siècle. In 2023, it issued a new reading of Charpentier’s popular Messe de Minuit (or “Midnight Mass”).