Les Meslanges, The Travels of Orpheus

In the first decades of the 17th century, music travels faster and further than ever. Composers from the Lage Landen move southwards, prints circulate, styles mix. Jehan Titelouze (ca. 1563-1633), born in Saint-Omer and working at the cathedral of Rouen, embodies that movement. He stands at the tipping point between renaissance and baroque, with one foot in the Franco-Flemish polyphony and with the other in a new, expressive French musical language. Les Meslanges places Titelouze central in a program that makes the finely branched international network of musicians, styles, and repertoire audible. Masses, motets, hymns, and canticles are alternated with organ music, and brought into dialogue with work by Orlandus Lassus and other contemporaries from the Lage Landen. The revelation is a recently rediscovered mass by Titelouze himself – a musicological discovery of magnitude and a rare look at the vocal oeuvre of a composer whom we mainly know as an organ pioneer. Brace yourself for Les voyages d’Orphée: a lively snapshot of a Europe in transition.