“La Jeune France” were a group set up in 1936 by the three composers represented on this disc (along with a fourth, Yves Baudrier) as a reaction against the neo-classicism of the time. Their aims were threefold: to promote chamber music, to restore spiritual values in music and to enrich music with mysticism and eroticism with a strong oriental flavour. Certainly all three works concentrate on the erotic, and both Jolivet and Messiaen employ musical devices drawn from non-western sources (the second part of Jolivet’s Epithalame is clearly heavily influenced by Chinese music). Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants is based on the legend of Tristan and Isolde, and as such forms part of a trilogy dating from the late 1940s (the other parts being Harawi and the Turangalila Symphony), while Jolivet sets his own poem dedicated to his wife on their twentieth wedding anniversary in a piece almost too full of disparate ideas and diverse musical idioms. Jean Yves Daniel-Lesur has turned to that most erotic of all writing, the Song of Songs, and been inspired to compose music which is gloriously lavish and luxuriant.
Recent recordings of twentieth-century a cappella music have invariably turned up outstanding performances. This is no exception. The Sixteen produce some of the most brilliant and technically accomplished singing I have ever heard. The lavish tone colours in the Messiaen are all the more astonishing since here The Sixteen are reduced to just 12 voices, while despite doubling that number for Daniel-Lesur’s opulent textures Harry Christophers can still draw from his singers such immaculate precision and uniformity of expression as would be the envy of most accomplished duettists. The recording is a gloriously full-blooded complement to this outstanding example of unaccompanied choral singing.'