‘I see these Vespers as a great incantatory ritual that connects the sacred with the pagan, the intimate with the collective. I experienced this powerful sensation many times in my childhood, in the choir of an abbey: the intense, warm light of a late summer day, filtering in from the west and reflected all the way up to the choir’, says Simon-Pierre Bestion.

The founder of La Tempête has made very personal choices for this recording, notably concerning the composition of the orchestra, which he has enriched with instruments from different cultures, including the serpent and the chitarrone. He has added ‘fauxbourdons’, simple improvised chants deriving from folk tradition. The colours of the voices in these Vespers are also very unusual: Bestion follows in the tradition of oral polyphony as it still exists in Corsica, Sardinia and Georgia.