Marc-Antoine Charpentier is a composer close to William Christie's heart - the conductor's Parisian ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, is named after one of Charpentier's many choral works. It's a shame that Charpentier is remembered today chiefly for the rather pompous opening of one of his Te Deum settings. For, as this concert of his Christmas music showed, there's a lot more to his writing than that.
This 17th-century composer had a keen ear for the dramatic and pictorial potential of the words he set to avoid boring his listeners. And he embraced the popular side of Christmas, weaving 11 carol tunes into his Messe de Minuit - a lively work, even though to recognise many of the tunes you'd have to be a 17th-century Frenchman.
But it was the more subdued or mystical images of his texts that brought out the best in Charpentier. Not for nothing was he a pupil of Carissimi, a composer who knew a thing or two about making harmonies twist and turn. In the second work on the programme, In Nativitatem Domini Canticum, the slow, sustained vocal lines as the angels called for peace on earth were intertwined lovingly and irresistibly, and the incarnation as described in the Credo of the Messe de Minuit seemed truly mysterious in the right sense. The choir, with their secure intonation and warm, unfussy timbre, brought off such moments with simple style.
The orchestra, for its part, did not seem to contain any players who could be described as rank and file. Christie is an authoritative but not domineering conductor - one senses that his success with this ensemble is the result of careful nurturing and detailed rehearsal rather than excessively firm guidance during the actual performance.
Though presented under the auspices of the Barbican Centre, the concert took place in the ornate, cathedral-like setting of the Guildhall. The hall's acoustics, resonant but not excessively so, suited the whole ensemble to the ground. It couldn't disguise the reediness of some of the higher-voiced male soloists, nor could it make their Parisian Latin, with French vowels and soft Js, sound natural to English ears. But, acoustically and visually, the venue produced an atmosphere that would have been impossible to replicate in the Barbican itself.
