Spanning six centuries, this collection of choral music for Easter was originally scheduled for recording in Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral in Spring 2019. Everything changed just days before Easter when, on April 15th, a devastating fire swept through the magnificent Gothic church. The Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris finally recorded the album two years later in the neo-Gothic basilica of Sainte-Clotilde, located between Les Invalides and the Musée d’Orsay.

Upholding Notre-Dame’s 800-year choral tradition, the Maîtrise offers training and performance opportunities to talented children, teenagers and adults. In 2020, its singers appeared on the Warner Classics CD Cathédrale d’émotions, an album that told the musical history of Notre-Dame from the 12th century to the 21st.

Pâques à Notre-Dame (Easter at Notre-Dame), conducted by the Maîtrise’s director Henri Chalet, comprises works by French, Italian and German composers. Three of them, including a Missa brevis, are by Yves Castagnet (b.1964), who is also the organist for the album; Sainte-Clotilde’s instrument is the work of the celebrated organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.  The other contemporary French composers to feature on the album are Jean-Charles Gandrille (b.1982), represented by a setting of the Stabat mater – which, on 14th April 2019, became the last polyphonic work to be performed at Notre-Dame before the fire – and Lise Borel (b.1993), whose ‘Regina Caeli’ is a Marian prayer on the Resurrection.

The earliest music on the album is by Claudio Monteverdi, more immediately associated with San Marco in Venice than with Notre-Dame, and his contemporary Hans Leo Hassler, who was born in Nuremberg, but studied in Venice. From the Baroque era, there is a ‘Crucifuxus’ by Antonio Lotto and from the 19th century there is the lyrical ‘Dextera Domini’ by César Franck, who was organist at Ste-Clotilde for more than 30 years. The two composers from the 20th century are Maurice Duruflé and Jehan Revert, who was in charge of music at Notre-Dame from 1959 to 1991.

Henri Chalet writes: “We know that Notre-Dame will rise again … More than ever, we will continue to sing for Notre-Dame, … so that everyone who hears us will keep her in their thoughts until she can once again show herself in her restored splendour and beauty.”

On the evening of 15th April 2019, the world was shocked and saddened when a huge fire swept through the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Consecrated in the 12th century, the magnificent Gothic church remains an enduring symbol of France and one of the great cultural treasures of humanity.

The origins of the cathedral’s choir school, Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris, also go back more than 800 years. Though the singers’ performing home is currently off limits as it undergoes restoration, they continue to make a lively contribution to musical life in the French capital, performing in churches and theatres. They also tour, both in France and internationally, with a visit to five US states in Spring 2020.

The Maîtrise, which encompasses five different choral ensembles, offers training and performance opportunities to talented children, teenagers and adults. In addition, the cathedral hosts a group of professional singers, the Ensemble vocal de Notre-Dame de Paris, which also features on Cathédrale d’émotions. The recordings on the album, made between 2012 and 2018, are conducted by Henri Chalet, director of the Maîtrise, and by Sylvain Dieudonné and Lionel Sow, who have also held senior posts at the choir school. The majority of the tracks were recorded in Notre-Dame itself.

Cathédrale d’émotions spans the entire history of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. It ranges from a song by Gautier de Coincy, a troubadour (Trouvère) born in the 1170s who sang the praises of the Virgin Mary to secular melodies, to the Magnificat by Jean-Charles Gandrille. Born in 1982, Gandrille is active as both an organist and a composer, and his 11-movement setting of the Virgin Mary’s canticle was premiered at Notre-Dame in 2016. (As it happens, a work by Gandrille was the last polyphonic music to be heard in the cathedral the day before the catastrophic fire in 2019.)

Among the other items on the album are: 13th century plainchant; Christmas songs written or arranged by three British composers active in the 20th century – Gustav Holst (1874-1934), William Mathias (1934-1992) and John Rutter (b.1945); a responsorial chant by the American composer Morten Lauridsen (b.1943); ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ by another French organist-composer, Yves Castagnet (b.1964), and an item from the Vêpres de la Vierge, inspired by Monteverdi’s sumptuous setting of the Vespers, which Philippe Hersant (b.1948) wrote to mark Notre-Dame’s 850th anniversary in 2013.  He conceived his score to showcase not just the choir, but both of the cathedral’s organs. Miraculously, its principal organ – built in the 19th century by the celebrated Cavaillé-Coll and, with some 8000 pipes, the largest instrument in France – survived the conflagration in 2019.

While the world looks forward to seeing Notre-Dame restored to its familiar physical glory, it can experience its musical joys through Cathédrale d’émotions.