To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel have chosen a work unlike any other: The Mass for 40 voices by composer Alessandro Striggio. On the occasion of this rediscovery, a film tells the incredible adventure of this lost mass.
A real police investigation
The first film is a fifty-minute documentary, Les Aventuriers de la Messe Perdue (The Adventurers of the Lost Mass), directed by Laurent Portes, which serves as a great introduction to the interpretation of the Mass of Striggio, with great pedagogical attention. The documentary gradually retraces the trail of this score and involves the enthusiastic Hervé Niquet, but also Dominique Visse, Philippe Ganguilhem, Jérémie Papasergio and Elisabeth Geiger, the musicians behind the project, who explain and narrate the circumstances of the composition of the work, its disappearance for centuries, its recent rediscovery, the conditions of its recreation, etc.
The documentary is completed by the capture of the mass realized by Olivier Simonnet in 2011 at la Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris. Plain-chant and polyphonies come to dress and live in the silence and majesty of the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, offering a unique panorama of Renaissance sacred music. You will discover the Mass, abounding, exhilarating, impressive and moving.
"But what is even more incredible is the story of this score: lost after Striggio's death, and totally forgotten in a few decades, miraculously preserved at the Archives royales de France, then at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, but under a false name, and accompanied by an erroneous notice ("mass for 4 voices"...), exhumed in the 70s by musicians who didn't know anything about it until now. The material was fantastic, there were all the elements of a historical and musical polar, and the opportunity to offer the broadest audience, television, an opening onto an artistic universe to which they rarely have access. So when I was offered the opportunity to direct this documentary film, I didn't hesitate for a second and embarked on the adventure."
Laurent Portes
