A musician of genius, Jean-Baptiste Lully put all his musical science at the service of intense oratorical emotion in the Grands Motets. These vast religious compositions, with their powerful dramatic character, were representative of the splendour deployed at the court of Louis XIV. The Dies irae and De profundis, imbued with great solemnity, were both given at the royal funeral of Louis XIV’s wife, Queen Maria Theresa of Spain, in 1863 in the Basilica of Saint-Denis. This extraordinary funereal ostentation was magnified by Lully’s works, making Madame de Sévigné remark that at their performance “all eyes were welled up with tears”.

Stéphane Fuget and Les Épopées – a veritable army of generals – deliver a grandiose, shimmering, theatrical and oratorical version of this music, draping it in an abundance of brilliant glittering ornaments, like the sun invigorating the stained-glass windows, mirrors and gilding of Versailles, to the point of eternity.