David Bates leads La Nuova Musica in "Sacrifices," a program of intensely dramatic oratorios from the middle Baroque: Giacomo Carissimi's Historia di Jephte; Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Sacrificium Abrahae and Le Reniement de saint Pierre, interspersed with instrumental music by Sébastien de Brossard.

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The pairing is a deliberate one. Carissimi's Jephte, telling the Old Testament story of a father forced to sacrifice his own daughter after a rash vow to God, is widely credited as the work that established the oratorio as a form, and its influence runs directly through to Charpentier, who studied in Rome and absorbed the Italian style at first hand. His Sacrificium Abrahae takes up a closely related story — Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac — while Le Reniement de Saint Pierre turns to the New Testament and Peter's threefold denial of Christ. Brossard's instrumental pieces, drawn from his own liturgical music, are used here as preludes to the oratorios, giving the programme a contemplative frame around its three settings of sacrifice and betrayal.

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The album was recorded in two sessions - at Snape Maltings in October 2012 and at St John's Smith Square in January 2014 - and released on Harmonia Mundi USA in 2014. Harmonia Mundi's own liner copy quotes a review of a related Spitalfields Festival performance, in which The Independent praised the ensemble's singing and noted Bates's preference, directing from the organ, for slow tempi and rich textures. Elsewhere, reception was warm if not universal: MusicWeb International called the performances a pleasure to hear from an accomplished cast, and Choir & Organ magazine praised the "soft-edged clarity" of the recording as an effective foil to its high emotional stakes.

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The recording earned Sacrifices a Le Choix de France Musique award, one of two Harmonia Mundi-era accolades in LNM's discography alongside A Royal Trio's Gramophone Editor's Choice. It also captures the ensemble relatively early in its history, not long into the five-disc Harmonia Mundi USA partnership that would carry LNM's work to international audiences through the mid-2010s.