La Grande Chapelle

Formation and performances

The musical ensemble plays sacred music; this genre has diminished because more popular music is played in churches. Furthermore, several churches contain works still to be discovered. La Grande Chapelle is one of the groups researching in that field.

Composers of several European countries and the formal founder Ángel Recasens created the group in 2005. The diversity of musicians encourages the unity of various musical techniques and schools.

The main objective of La Grande Chapelle is to recover musical treasures, a legacy from the 16th century until the beginning of the 21st century. Another objective of the association is to perform early repertory at festivals, such as the Festival Internacional Cervantino where the vocal ensemble presented music from the 16th century, including Tomás Luis de Victoria's Mass Salve Regina (1592), and pieces dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

La Grande Chapelle has performed at different important festivals in Spain and France, such as the ones in Picardie and Haut-Jura, and Musica Sacra Maastricht, OsterKlang-Festival and at La Cité de la Musique in Paris. The ensemble has performed in Belgium, France, Hungary, Mexico, Canada, Japan and China. Their repertory includes antiphons and motets, the psalm Nisi Dominus and the Magnificat primi toni. They also perform the Missa pro Defunctis by Mateo Romero, Music for the Corpus of Joan Pau Pujol, and the mass O Gloriosa Virginum by Antonio Rodríguez de Hita.

The director Albert Recasens promoted the creation of the recording label Lauda in 2005. This company has released records focused to the exploration of the relationship between music and literature of the Golden Century. La Grande Chapelle’s recordings under this label have been recognized by the Orphée d´Or, besides being called the label of the year by the Prelude Classical Music Awards of 2007 in the Netherlands.

Discography