Ever since that first angelic night, Christmas has been celebrated in song. In the baroque period, many composers such as Charpentier have composed original masterpieces based on simple folk tunes. Here in a special double album edition are baroque carols from the choir of La Maîtrise de Radio France, with Les Musiciens de Saint Julien, as well as the best-known French Christmas carols (Les anges dans nos campagnes, Venez divin messie...) from the Maîtrises of Radio France and Notre-Dame de Paris. The two internationally renowned children’s choirs combine to celebrate the Nativity and share with us these timeless songs.

Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has enjoyed enormous fame ever since the eighteenth century – Jean-Jacques Rousseau called its first movement ‘the most perfect and touching that has ever come from the pen of any composer’. There were many arrangements of the work, by Bach among others. It was performed more than eighty times at the Concert Spirituel in Paris between 1753 and 1790, in multiple versions, probably also with the participation of a choir.

After consulting several manuscripts and editions held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Julien Chauvin has chosen to record it with soprano and mezzo soloists (the equivalent of the French dessus and bas-dessus) and a two-part children’s choir: ‘The choir can play a real role in the narration of so powerful and poignant a text’, he says. This recording teams two emblematic singers of the Alpha label with the excellent Maîtrise de Radio France, of which Adèle was a member as a girl. To complement the Neapolitan masterpiece, we have a ‘sacred’ symphony by Haydn, "La Passione," probably written for Good Friday and in the same key as the Stabat.