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Recording

Capricornus: Jauchzet dem Herrn alle Welt

Capricornus Ensemble Stuttgart, Henning Wiegräbe
57:00
Coviello Classics COV91721

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e have a saying in English: “You wait ages for a certain bus and then two come along at once”. That is how fans of Capricornus’ music must feel – it has been many years now since the excellent Parlement de musique recording, and now we have a marvellous account of his Jubilus Bernardi AND the present recital of smaller-scale pieces from the Capricornus Ensemble Stuttgart. Where the Jubilus is consistently scored for five voices with five-part viols and continuo, the works here are for one or two solo voices and the scoring varies, and always in an interesting way; the composer clearly had an ear for instrumental colour, and enjoying the different combinations.

[Video commentary in German]

Both Lydia Teuscher (soprano) and Philip Niederberger (bass)’ voices are perfectly suited to this repertoire; intonation is immaculate, both use vibrato as an ornament, and both are adept at stylishly executing filigree decoration. They are matched by the instrumentalists of the Capricornus Ensemble. What we need now is a disc of some of the pieces for four or five voices with a mixture of instruments; Cornetto-Verlag (also in Stuttgart, where Capricornus was Kapellmeister for the latter part of his short life) is producing a complete edition of his music, so there is no shortage of material. On the evidence of this CD, I think these top-class performers are the perfect candidates to bring us more from the master.

Brian Clark

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Recording

Schelle: Actus Musicus auf Weyh-Nachten

Kölner Akademie, Michael Alexander Willens
74:34
cpo 555 155-2

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is the first CD devoted solely to Johann Schelle that I am aware of since Robert King’s “Contemporaries of Bach” series. In some ways, that is understandable, since Schelle is not always shy in employing all the forces available to him, so performing his music can be expensive. The rewards are, however, commensurate with the outlay and effort, as these fine performances confirm. I wish I had had time to digest it and write about it ahead of Christmas, and I hope that anyone who saw it before the Festive season grabbed it with both hands – there is something about the story of Christmas that really sets composer’s imaginations alight, and Schelle is no exception. Any excuse to have glorious trumpets for the herald angels, and recorders for the shepherds; that is not to suggest, at all, that the music is derivative or cliched… Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the repertoire chosen is the composer’s varied handling of the Lutheran chorales that form their backbone; the phrases are broken down into fantasy episodes (much in the way Bach would do in his chorale preludes or the opening movements to his cantatas), but some are not so much treated as thematic material for contrapuntal ingenuity but merely introduced by the first few notes played by instruments (perhaps reflecting contemporary practice in congregational hymn singing?); in other movements, both techniques are used. I confess that I found some of the narrative sections of the Actus Musicus auf Weyh-Nachten  a little “challenging” (much in the same way I find Schütz’s Passion “recitative” – frankly – boring…), but the more I listened, the more I “got it”, and it dawned on me that the whole point was that this is not art music, it is real-life liturgical music, speaking from the musical pulpit to the gathered Christian church, relating one of their greatest stories – and they would both know and hang on the Evangelist’s every word. So, an educational experience as well as a valuable musical one. Let’s hope more people will explore Schelle’s music (and Rosenmüller’s and Knüpfer’s before him!)

Brian Clark

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Recording

In Chains of Gold: The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem Vol. 1

Orlando Gibbons – Complete Consort Anthems
Fretwork, His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts, Magdalena Consort
Signum Classics, SIGCD 511

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his splendid recording of all Orlando Gibbons’ Consort Anthems, the brain-child of the knowledgeable and experienced Bill Hunt and the Orlando Gibbons project, is the first in what promises to be a definitive series of this highly English art form that flourished in the increasingly troubled years of the first half of the 17th century, when private chapels hosted much of the quality ecclesiastical music-making.

The collaboration between Fretwork and His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts ensures playing of both wind and viol consort of world class standard, but what is exciting in this first CD is the quality of the singers assembled by Peter Harvey, and their attention to the sound-world of the contrasting groups of instrumentalists, used together only in Lord, grant grace. At the forefront of their concerns is the proper rhetorical declamation of the words, so we have a serious demonstration of what would have been called in contemporary Italy the seconda prattica. Here this word-based music is inspired by the verbal finesse of the texts, set with due regard for the 1559 Elizabethan injunction “that the same may be as plainly understanded as if it were read without singing”.

The erudite – and sometimes over-fancifully-expressed – notes by David Pinto, whose 2003 editions for Fretwork are used here, chart the context of these compositions. They centre on the Chapel Royal, and Pinto makes a good case for using both wind and viol consorts. Gibbons worked in the Chapel with Launcelot Andrewes, possibly the Church of England’s greatest wordsmith after Cranmer, and we see Gibbons apply a sensitivity to setting the texts that set new standards for declamatory composition that was taken up by his contemporaries like Thomas Tomkins. The combination of A=466 and the conviction that the basic vocal group should respect the clef and pitch of the composer’s intentions give us that essential singing group of Soprano or Mean, Contra or High Tenors, Low Tenor/Baritone and Bass. This vocal consort matches the rich instrumental textures admirably and is provided by Peter Harvey’s splendidly balanced Magdalena Consort. Singing groups who overload their top lines in the tradition of cathedral choirs, or who raise the pitch to make room for 18th-century-style falsettists, take note!

The elegant restraint showed by every singer in matching not only their tone but their volume to that of the halo of instruments in the single voice or duet passages only very occasionally, when singers and players are going at full tilt, gives way to the temptation to oversing. Just occasionally – as, for example, in the Gloria of Blessed are all they that fear the Lord  – this runs the risk of defeating the careful balance between voices and instruments. The desire to sing out – to make sure that your line is clearly audible – is so often just what singers feel is natural to do, and what indeed so many directors encourage them to do. The sense that your singers can notch up a gear without running the risk of vulgar, quasi-operatic distortion is almost too great to resist. But this is just the moment to urge restraint. None is necessary when the limpid Charles Daniels – peerless in this clean and intricate figuration, as in This is the record of John  – or the two upper voices of Eleanor Minney and Sam Boden in Lord, grant grace  are singing so perfectly together, but very occasionally I longed to say ‘Hold it: if you all sing out like that, the texture is getting too thick, and I can hear less, not more, of the exquisite lines.’ I experienced a touch of that over-ripeness from the upper voices of Catherine King and Eleanor Minney in the full sections of O all true and faithful hearts. Perhaps when they felt competition from the cornetti?

This elegant restraint is what comes naturally to consort players, who spend their time listening to each other, pulling back from the long, held notes, and waiting for the moment when they lead off in some short note-value thread of imitative writing where the figuration leads to an expressive syllable or word when the line is vocalised.

This – in a fine quotation from Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction  – is just what Hunt puts on the title page, and is worth quoting here in full:

“ …to return to the expressing of the ditty, the matter is now come to that state that though a song be never so well made and never so aptly applied to the words yet shall you hardly find singers to express it as it ought to be, for most of our churchmen, so that they can cry louder in their choir than their fellows, care for no more, whereas by the contrary they ought to study how to vowel and sing clean, expressing their words with devotion and passion whereby to draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things.”

This is the finest recording of this quintessentially English music that we are likely to have, and I urge everyone to start collecting these volumes as they appear over the coming years. This is a real treat, and an impressive master-class in how these texts should be declaimed.

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Bach: Magnificat in E flat | Missa in F

Hannah Morrison, Angela Hicks, Charlotte Ashley, Reginald Mobley, Eleanor Minney, Hugo Hymas, Gianluca Buratto, Jake Muffett SSSAATBB, monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
73:53
Soli Deo Gloria SDG728
+BWV151

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ecorded in December 2016 in the spacious acoustic of St Jude’s, Hampstead Garden Suburb and released for this Christmastide, this elegantly produced CD couples some delightful music with the early version of the Magnificat, that was probably a show-piece for Bach’s first Christmas day Vespers in Leipzig in 1723.

From the start, the swirling polyphony of the opening Kyries of the Missa in F, where the ‘cantus firmus’ of Christe, du Lamm Gottes  on the corni tethers the energetic polyphony in this adaptation of an earlier Weimar Kyrie, introduces the energy and direction of this CD. The following Gloria uses material from (among other sources) Cantata 40, performed on the 2nd day of that Christmas in 1723, and BWV 151 was written for the 3rd day of Christmas in 1725, so all the pieces are appropriate for a Christmas-tide CD of Bach.

The roulades of the corni and the close imitation of the voices in the opening of the Gloria in the Missa give an almost hunt-like urgency to the chase, and Gardiner’s crisp and energetic delivery is helped by a smaller than usual choir (9.5.4.4) from whose ranks singers step forward to sing the arias and recitatives. Star among them are the more established Hannah Morrison, Reginald Moberly and Hugo Hymas, but a welcome new voice to me was Angela Hicks who sings the long and difficult aria that opens Süßer Trost  (BWV 151). Here the balance between the singer, the strings topped with an oboe d’amore and the single traverso is captured wonderfully, the voice balancing the tender flute marvellously – yet fully capable of the sudden brightening up in the quick triplets of the central section of the aria before recovering the cradle-like calm of the da capo. Gardiner’s use of his chorus singers provides us not only with excellent and stylish performances of the arias, but with consistency of sound throughout the vocal scoring and the consequent easy blend between singers and instruments. He seems increasingly confident not just in his singers’ accomplishments – as he properly should – but in creating this newly-minted overall sound, which to me is most welcome. As a result, the cumulative effect of the (individually) quite short movements of the Magnificat has a coherence and momentum that some of his earlier recordings lack.

A dialogue between Gardiner and Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, himself a trumpeter and recording producer as well as Principal of the Royal Academy, forms the bulk of the well-produced booklet. The discussion touches on the question of the performing pitch for the E flat Magnificat, but the central question – is the E flat Magnificat one of those earlier works where the wind parts are in E flat and played at 392, so the sounding pitch holds to 415? – is only tangentially referred to, and Don Smithers’ careful arguments in 1996 arguing for the lower pitch are dismissed rather than refuted. E flat is a surprising key for trumpet parts – notated as usual in the score in C – to sound in, so what was the actual pitch at which this Magnificat was first performed? Did a set of parts for strings in E flat ever exist? In the end, you have to make informed choices about these matters, but I am not wholly convinced that the Magnificat ever actually sounded in E flat at 415. And unless and until some parts for the Magnificat performance of 1723 come to light, we will never be sure.

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Caldara: Motetti a due o tre voci op. 4

Ingeborg Dalheim, Anna Kellnhofer, Franz Vitzthum, Jan Van Elsacker, Florian Götz SScTTB, United Continuo Ensemble
59:06
Pan Classics PC 10362

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]est known perhaps for his striking 16-part setting of the “Crucifixus”, this CD illustrates the opposite end of Antonio Caldara’s range as a composer, small-scale miniatures for two and three solo voices with continuo. Several of the works demonstrate his penchant for the tortured suspensions which characterize the “Crucifixus”, but on the whole this is much more light-hearted repertoire. The five soloists, appearing in batches of two or three, have a pleasant uncomplicated way with the music, ornamenting gently and naturally where appropriate, and interacting very effectively, while the continuo group supports them very sensitively and effectively. After training in Venice, Caldara moved first to Mantua and then Rome and it is possible to hear elements of all three musical traditions in his pleasing music. In among the motets, organist Johannes Hämmerle plays contemporary music by Sweelinck, Weckmann and Franz Tunder on the historic organ of Schloss Gottorf in Schleswig, which dates from around 1560 and which has a wonderfully authentic sound for this repertoire. 5555

D. James Ross

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Ludford: Missa Dominica

Trinity Boys Choir, Handbell Choir Gotha, Lewis Brito-Babapulle, David Swinson
79:21
Rondeau Horizon ROP8001

[dropcap]T[dropcap]his CD provides a window on a neglected area of repertoire, the generally small-scale settings by Renaissance composers of the extended ordinary for Ladymass. While the excellent Nicholas Ludford has never quite regained the reputation he deserves as an outstanding and highly original Renaissance English composer, at least his larger-scale mass settings have all been recorded several times. The same cannot be said of his three-part settings of the Ladymass, one of which is recorded here for the first time. Presenting the music in two different guises, for unaccompanied choral voices, and for solo voices accompanied by organ, both of which work very well, is an excellent concept. The handbells, something of an add-on in this programme, supply two accounts of the Square Le Roy, as well as joining the boys in one of the later modern works. Although much of the singing is pleasantly lyrical, there is occasional downward pressure on the intonation. Having said that, the clear tone of the boys’ voices blends beautifully with Ludford’s imaginative writing for them, suggesting that these settings are well worth further exploration. In addition to the Mass, the choir provides lovely performances of the medieval carols Ther is no Rose of Swych Vertu  and Angelus ad Virginem  (with some curious choices of hard and soft consonants) as well as two modern pieces. The Trinity Boys Choir are to be congratulated for tackling this neglected and technically demanding music, and this CD very usefully provides a window on an important part of Ludford’s output and a generally overlooked body of early polyphony.4555

D. James Ross

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De Croes: Motetten

Bettina Pahn, Julian Podger, Peter Harvey STB, Cappela Brugensis, Collegium Instrumental Brugense, Patrick Peire
64:00
Et’cetera KYC 1605 ((c) 2003)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he 18th-century Dutch composer Henri-Jacques de Croes served a number of noble households throughout Europe, including the Thurn und Taxis family in Frankfurt and Charles of Lorraine. These motets are essentially cantatas with sections for chorus and solo voices, all with string accompaniment, and stylistically owe a lot to the music of Antonio Vivaldi. We also find him falling under the musical spell of more modern composers such as Handel, but – as he lived until 1786 when he would have been over eighty – his music must have sounded quaintly old-fashioned by the time he retired. Just occasionally, de Croes does something a little more distinctive and idiosyncratic, such as the bagpipe drone effects at the opening of Confitemini Domine, but these are fleeting instances of originality in a style which is generally almost entirely conventional and derivative. These performances are attractive, with beautifully measured solo contributions, and fine choral and orchestral performances throughout. Sadly for de Croes, the 18th century was packed with gifted composers, well-known and neglected, who had much more to say musically than he seemed to.

D. James Ross

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[EX]TRADITION

The Curious Bards
62:47
harmonia mundi HMN 916105
Scottish & Irish airs, reels, jigs, dances and variations with compositions of Carolan

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his minimally packaged CD seems to be the first of a new series from harmonia mundi entitled “Harmonia Nova”, designed to bring new artists to a wider audience – it is a mark of the trendy packaging that, until I looked into it, I had transposed the name of the CD with that of the performing group. The recording is devoted to the music of 18th-century Scotland and Ireland, and (with the naivete of youth) Alix Boivert opens his programme note with the extraordinary assertion that the music of eighteenth-century Scotland and Ireland is ‘practically forgotten’ and that it is the mission of the group ‘to bring to light a cultural legacy’. The hazards of bringing to light someone else’s cultural legacy are laid horribly bare in the vocal contributions by guest singer, Ilektra Platiopoulou, who – perhaps understandably – has little concept of any attempt at authentic pronunciation or even an appropriate style of vocal production.

[Video commentary in French]

Having said that, Boivert has gone to all the right 18th-century sources and he and his players have mastered to a remarkable degree traditional Scottish and Irish playing techniques, and have applied them very convincingly on their period instruments. As a reviewer, it is important just to wait around long enough and you learn that there is truly nothing new under the sun; for me, these well-intentioned performances recalled the work of the Baltimore Consort around twenty years ago. I think those fine players and advocates of the musical legacy of Scotland and Ireland, as well as more recent tireless exponents of precisely the repertoire represented here such as David McGuinness and his superb Concerto Caledonia, might take issue with the idea that this repertoire is ‘practically forgotten’, but the Curious Bards are undoubtedly making a valuable contribution to bringing this attractive music to a still wider audience. Just sit back and get in touch with the curious Celt within.

D. James Ross

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Zuguambé: Music for liturgy from the monastery from Santa Cruz de Coimbra c. 1650

Capella Sanctæ Crucis, Tiago Simas Freire
57:31
harmonia mundi HMN 916107

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his third CD from harmonia mundi’s Nova series is devoted to music associated with the liturgy performed in the mid-17th century at the Portuguese Monastery of Coimbra. Most of the music is anonymous and is taken from the Monastery’s manuscript collections, which contain a curious mixture of sacred and secular repertoire. Tiago Simas Freire argues that this suggests that these madrigals and villancicos de Negro  served a liturgical purpose, and they are included here in the general flow of the liturgy. I have my doubts about this – surely it is much more likely that the monks recorded this secular music simply for their own private enjoyment. As none of the texts are supplied, it is impossible to judge the contents of these villancicos, but they sound rather saucy for liturgical use. The wide range of instruments are beautifully played and blend very well with the eight voices, while Freire’s innovative approach to music which he clearly knows very well is refreshing and thought-provoking. The jazzy rhythms and the insistent percussion recalls the recordings made by various groups a few years back of south American sacred repertoire, and this CD is no less catchy. The HM Nova series has the rather off-putting house style of presenting the young performers staring intensely from the covers of the package, but it does seem to be offering a fresh look at old repertoire and to be providing a platform for these young and very capable musicians. And I’m afraid that even after reading the programme notes, I am still none the wiser as to what Zuguambé is…

D. James Ross

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Categories
Recording

Parle qui veut: Moralizing songs of the Middle Ages

Sollazzo ensemble
46:00
Linn Records CKD529

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] CD of moralizing songs from the Middle Ages may not, on the face of it, sound like the most attractive prospect, but when I put on this CD I was instantly captivated by the superb performances. Soaring and fluttering around with perfect tone and intonation, these impressive young singers breathe astonishing new life into the music of the 14th and 15th centuries which they sing here. In recent years, a number of ensembles have tackled this repertoire with such virtuosity and musicality that I have been converted to hearing it as beautiful and beguiling music in its own right rather than puzzling repertoire that it was important to listen to for its historical merit. As an example of the group’s stunning technique and persuasive performance style, listen to track 4, a breathtaking account of Andrea de Firenze’s Dal traditor, and then, for sheer beguiling beauty, listen to the next track, Le basile  by Solage. Throughout this CD, the blend between the voices and the instruments is superb, and again and again new meaning is breathed into music which I had previously heard only in rather worthy performances, if at all. At 46 minutes, this is a rather short CD, but the performers have absolutely made the repertoire their own and turned conjured up 46 minutes of vocal and instrumental perfection. Magical!

D. James Ross

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