Jacques Antoine Denoyé, a Strasbourg church musician who died in 1759, is passed by in the music dictionaries, and the paucity both of surviving works and further facts about him no doubt makes it hard to see why he should concern modern-day scholars or performers. Fortunately, either Martin Gester or someone at the Ambronay Festival (where this live recording was made last autumn) thinks differently, and the result is the revival of a choral-and-orchestral Mass of great charm. Seemingly inspired by the lilting measures and leaning dissonances of Rameau’s operatic music, it may not be everyone’s idea of proper church music, but the models are well chosen and there is dignity and gravitas when needed. Gester also has the happy idea of inserting extra numbers between the main Mass-sections, where they add considerably to the work’s emotional weight. One is an adaptation of a Rameau aria, the others an orchestral passacaille and ravishing sommeil based (I think) on Denoyé organ pieces.

The theme of secular music adapted to church use is enterprisingly followed up in the coupling, Michel Corrette’s 1766 appropriation of Vivaldi’s “Spring” as a setting of the psalm Laudate Dominum. It sounds like a joke but in fact it is a tour de force of quite considerable skill; the way Corrette releases Vivaldi’s opening bars adorned with joyous choral singing at the end of a creeping orchestral sunrise is a masterstroke, the finale’s stealthy introduction is equally inspired, and the re-ordering and redistribution of familiar material shows taste and resource throughout. In short, an enchanting piece of work.

The Corrette has been recorded before but not especially well. These performances, being live, are not unblemished, but have style and atmosphere, much of the latter being attributable to the church acoustic and the girls’ voices of La Maîtrise de Bretagne. Really quite a nice little surprise.