Under the direction of Léo Warynski, the choir Les Métaboles often plays the game of historical crossovers between works of the repertoire and contemporary music. This is once again the case in this very fine recording, The Angels, which brings together choral works by William Byrd, Henry Purcell and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina with compositions by Jonathan Harvey.

What makes the associations between the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that of our time so natural and fruitful? Certainly, the shifting harmonies and formal freedom deployed between the Renaissance and the Baroque, in the conquest of a mannered figuralism and expressive dissonance, are in line with some of today's research. Choral writing and vocality, whatever the period and the grammar adopted, are inevitably charged with the same touching humanity for the listener. Above all, the sacred is timeless by nature, and the choice of works from the past - Byrd's Ave verum corpus , Purcell's Remember not, Lord, our offences and Palestrina's Stabat mater - cannot but resonate with Jonathan Harvey 's (1939-2012) profound quest for spirituality, with which he renewed during the 1970s.

After a childhood lulled by the Anglican polyphonies of the Renaissance, the young man had indeed for a time distanced himself from religion, advocating a rationalist atheism nourished by science and philosophy. The meeting with Karlheinz Stockhausen, the assiduous reading of Rudolf Steiner, the initiation into Tibetan Buddhism and Vedic meditation, combined with the attentive rediscovery of biblical texts, made him take this new step, greatly influencing his future compositions. Thus, Harvey's catalogue includes many sacred choral works, centered on the quintessential voice of a cappella, while many other compositions make use of the most advanced computer technologies. Some of these pieces were written for the choir of Winchester Cathedral, where his son sings.

The six works selected for this album were written between 1976 and 2012. Often simple in appearance and entirely at the service of the text, like the initial psalmody that opens I Love the Lord, they are all of great finesse in their writing and testify to a perfect mastery of timbre and balance, certainly due in part to the composer's electroacoustic practice. Thus, the beginning of Come, Holy Ghost, very close to monodic Gregorian chant, quickly becomes filled with resonant drones, evoking the sounds of bells, and then develops into a fascinating polyphonic architecture with a double chorus. This is also the case with Plainsongs for Peace and Light for sixteen solo voices, probably his last work completed on the threshold of death. The Angels, which gives its title to this disc - recorded on 7 September 2019 by Radio France during a concert at the Abbaye de Royaumont - closes it with subtle and mysterious harmonies, in a gentle sway, resting on a double choir. Les Métaboles perform the entire programme with the same expressive élan, with crystalline clarity and an art of deep resonance, offering a fusional dialogue between past and present.

Guillaume Kosmicki