Rocamadour 2020: La Sportelle sings Motets

Rocamadour 2020: La Sportelle sings Motets

Over the course of eleven days in August 2020, the French town of Rocamadour hosted the fifteenth edition of Festival de Rocamadour, a music festival dedicated to sacred music from the classical, baroque, and romantic periods. On August 25, the French soprano Laetitia Corcelle led her vocal ensemble La Sportelle for a performance of sacred music and motets at the atmospheric medieval Basilique Saint-Sauveur. Mezzo soprano Anne Bertin-Hugault opens the concert with solo performances of a selection of one-thousand-year-old works by Hildegard von Bingen: O Pastor Animarum, O nobilissima viriditas, Spiritus Sanctus, O Splendidissima Gemma, Caritas, Rex Noster, and lastly Alleluia! O virga mediatrix. Then Bertin-Hugault is joined by Cédric Baillergau (bass), Steve Zheng (tenor), and soprano Laetitia Corcelle for more modern and even contemporary material: Northern Lights and Ubi caritas by the Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, Ubi caritas by the French composer Christoper Gibert, and Adoro te by the French composer Mel Bonis stem from our own day and age. The program continues with Anton Bruckner's Christus factus est, Gioachino Rossini's O salutaris hostia, Charles Gounod's Les Sept Paroles de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ sur la Croix, and then comes to an end with Johannes Brahms's O Heiland, Reiß.