Marc-Antoine Charpentier was the most original and profound French composer of the seventeenth century.  He wrote some of his greatest church music for the private chapel of his patron, the Duchesse de Guise.  This concert includes his intense six-part setting of the Miserere and the oratorio ‘Caecilia virgo et martyr’.  The Duchesse de Guise perferred viols to violins, so Charpentier’s music for her chapel uses the attractively veiled sonority of two treble viols and bass viol.