Amply demonstrating that Charles-Hubert Gervais didn't just excel in composing operas, Gyorgy Vashegyi turns his attention to the French Baroque composer's sacred music, with this new disc of Grands Motets, containing five extended and sumptuous psalms and hymns, involving soloists, chorus and orchestra.

Gervais' relative modern-day anonymity in this genre can to a large extent be placed at the door of historical circumstance: during the end of the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, he was employed by the king's younger brother Philippe d'Orleans and continued so during d'Orleans Regency. It wasn't until 1723 that Gervais obtained an official post as one of the four sous-maotres of the Chapelle du Roi. At this point, any motet he wrote went straight into the royal library without publication and has required today's transcribers to create performing editions.

Tones of celebration, relief (on Louis XVI's recovery from a nasty illness), solemnity, meditation, a dash of restrained theatricality, bold harmonies and lighter orchestral textures than with Lalande (or Bernier and Campra) provide Vashegyi's Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra with plenty of scope to demonstrate their collective mastery and experience of the idiom.

Gyrgy Vashegyi was born in Budapest in 1970 and started his musical studies as an instrumentalist: he played the violin, flauto dolce, the oboe (then the baroque oboe) and the harpsichord. At the age 18 he became a student of conducting under Ervin Lukcs at the Ferenc Liszt Music Academy in Budapest, obtaining his diploma with distinction in 1993. In 1990 he founded the Purcell Choir in Budapest for a concert performance of Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, and one year later the Orfeo Orchestra with which he performed the complete L'Orfeo by Monteverdi for the first time in Hungary. Since then the two ensembles have become Hungary's leading early music group: their main repertoire ranges from Gesualdo to Haydn and Mozart, but they also perform later compositions.