A Nocte Temporis

The early music ensemble A Nocte Temporis (stylized as a nocte temporis) rapidly won major recording awards and earned bookings in top venues after its formation in 2016. The group has specialized in small-ensemble performances of music from the middle and high Baroque. A nocte temporis ("From Time Immemorial," or in French "depuis la nuit des temps," from which "a nocte temporis" is a direct translation) was formed in 2016 by singer Reinoud Van Mechelen, a 2012 graduate of the Royal Conservatory who had often performed as a soloist with Les Arts Florissants, La Petite Bande, and Les Talens Lyriques, as well as other top early music groups. In 2017, he won the Caecilia Prize as Young Musician of the Year from Belgium's music journalism community. Van Mechelen stated that his goal with the new group was "to present historically informed music as well as to emotionally touch as large an audience as possible." With this distinguished pedigree, the new ensemble, which usually performs as a quintet, quickly found top-level bookings. A nocte temporis toured various European capitals with an all-Bach program in 2017, and the following year saw invitations from the Chapelle Royale du Château de Versailles, the Opéra de Lille, and the BOZAR Festival in Brussels. The group toured in 2019 with a new program, The Dubhlinn Gardens, becoming one of the few to explore the nexus between Baroque music and Irish folk music in the 18th century. The recordings of a nocte temporis have been especially strongly acclaimed. The group has recorded for the Alpha label, issuing its debut, Erbarme dich (a program of Bach cantatas) in 2016. That album and its successor, a collection of French cantatas by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, were garlanded with a variety of awards (a CHOC, a Diapason d'Or, and five other Diapason awards in France, and another Caecilia Prize in Belgium). After releasing an album based on the Dubhlinn Gardens program, a nocte temporis returned in 2020 with a release covering several treatments of the story of Orpheus' descent into hell by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. ~ James Manheim