Messe de Minuit pour Noel - $16.95

Marc-Antoine Charpentier probably wrote the Messe for Christmas 1694 - using several French carols as its basis. The music of the mass itself is quintessentially French baroque: transparency, lots of dotted rhythms, homophonic textures mingling with limpid counterpoint and, most of all, a lack of stolidity so common to German baroque sacred music of the time. This recording is super and the performance entirely satisfying.