Conductor Hervé Niquet will open the Fenice Theatre’s 2024-2025 symphony season on December 6 and 7. He and the resident orchestra and choir will perform in a programme dedicated to French music, whose highlights include Charpentier’s Te Deum and works by Dauvergne and Méhul. Guest stars will enrich the already very special programme: soprano Sarah Charles, mezzosoprano Flore Royer, tenors Lé Guillou-Kérédan and Attila Varga-Tóth, and baritone Halidou Nombre from the Opéra Royal de Versailles. Méhul’s First Symphony in G- displays many of the quintessential traits of the French music school, and while Dauvergne followed Lully’s lead, and Méhul shows an otherwise Viennese influence, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s sacred music bears the imprint of master composer of the Counter- Reformation Giacomo Carissimi’s teachings, and the first few minutes of his Te Deum concerto are known to anybody who tuned in a pan-European TV broadcast.
