Etienne Moulinié (1599-1676) was director of music to Louis XIII’s rebellious younger brother Duke Gaston of Orléans; he also served as music master to the duke’s daughter Anne. In 1652 the troublesome duke was ordered to retire to the countryside permanently by his nephew Louis XIV, and reorganised his household at Blois. By this time Moulinié’s Meslanges de sujets chrétiens was ready for publication, although in the event it was not printed until 1658, and was dedicated to Gaston’s second wife Marguerite de Lorraine.

The miscellany contains 36 pieces such as motets, litanies, canticles and other ‘Christian subjects’, and the composer’s preface expressed his wish to ‘purify music and make it wholly chaste’. Sébastien Daucé configures Ensemble Correspondances approximately along the lines of the Duke of Orléans’ musical establishment in its prime for this enthralling selection of short five-part motets. Assured soloists are drawn from the ranks of the dozen-strong choir, and their fluent solo passages and glorious choral textures combine sumptuously with a compact yet sonorously varied instrumental group of recorders, viols, lute, theorbo and organ. A magnificent setting of Cantate Domino and the madrigalian Flores apparuerunt suggest Moulinié’s Italianate influences, and the quasi-Venetian ‘Alleluia’ refrain that concludes the Christmas motet Magi videntes stellam illuminates that such miniature pieces are capable of real grandeur in the right hands.