Category: Recording

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The Melodious Birde

Dark green flowers

Keyboard music by William Byrd
Colin Booth harpsichord and virginals
75:50
Soundboard SBCD217 Fugue State Records FSRCD013

The steady flow of distinguished discs devoted to, or featured around, Byrd’s keyboard music shows no sign of abating. This recent recording by Colin Booth is another fine contribution to the stream. Using three different instruments, it is devoted entirely to Byrd, covering all the genres in which he composed, and combining some unfamiliar pieces with some stalwarts of the Byrdian keyboard repertory.

Right from the outset, it is evident that Booth’s approach has more to do with affection for the composer’s works, rather than with storming Byrd’s barns. Lord Willoughby’s welcome home is all about Byrd’s exquisite melodies and harmonies, and his beguiling counterpoint. Booth is at pains to render all this as clearly as possible, with feeling but not with sentimentality. Another of Byrd’s “standards” The queen’s alman receives a similarly clear and more assertive performance. That said, the Third pavan and galliard could have done with a touch more of the same assertiveness, as on this occasion Booth’s restraint sells this powerful piece slightly short. But it is another pavan and galliard pairing, dedicated to Ph[ilippa] Tr[egian], that shows Booth’s thoughtful and penetrating approach at its very best, most notably in the exquisite second strain in which Byrd’s closely argued counterpoint is beautifully presented, contributing to what has a strong claim to be the finest version on disc of this familiar and particularly intense work. The performance of Byrd’s deeply felt Pavan and Galliard BK52 in d (a work which seems to have influenced Gibbons, e.g. his Pavan MB 20/16) is on the same level of interpretation: as it were, gently persuading the notes to express Byrd’s profound intentions in the Pavan, while, as in Ph. Tr., putting a spring in the step of the Galliard without setting off too explosively.

There is an expectation, always fulfilled, that Byrd’s pavans will reward both performers and listeners, so they tend consistently to be selected for recordings and concerts. Until recently grounds did not possess that cache, perhaps suspected of being no more than academic exercises. Booth turns any such assumptions on their heads with enchanting renditions of two “short” Grounds. His pacing of both works – BK 27 and especially 43 – is ideal: patient enough to elucidate Byrd’s argument through his narrative counterpoint and appetizing harmonies but crisp enough not to plod. This appreciation of what such works have to offer has extended particularly to one of Byrd’s towering masterpieces Ut re mi fa sol la and although the nature of Byrd’s writing here means that it is best served by being performed on an organ which can sustain notes in order to give continuity to the piece’s narrative and to point up Byrd’s luscious suspensions, nevertheless even on the small harpsichord which Booth selects for this piece, he brings out most of these details.

Like his pavans, Byrd’s fantasias have always been de rigueur for discs and recitals. Booth chooses two of the best known, the Praeludium and Fantasia BK 12-13 and A fancy for my Lady Nevell BK 25. BK 13 Is the earliest masterpiece of European keyboard music, a kaleidoscope of melodies, harmonies, techniques and structures, the product of a restless yet disciplined mind. Some recordings of it have been rigid, some extravagant. Booth follows the contours of Byrd’s imagination and allows the music to speak for itself yet without discarding restraint. The result is an illuminating interpretation which manages to be clear but also expressive. Incidentally Booth observes the repeat at bars 58ff. which is noted by Byrd’s pupil Tomkins in his source, but which is omitted by Tregian in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. BK 25 can also be played as a powerhouse, its opening upward octave perhaps taken from Byrd’s setting of the word “lux” in his motet Descendit de coelis from his second book of Cantiones sacrae, 1591. Booth’s considered performance is more in the spirit of the piece being played domestically than one busting any of Byrd’s blocks, but still responding to the flow of Byrd’s creativity in what is one of his most surging keyboard works. The final work on the disc, A voluntary for my Lady Nevell, can also be mentioned in the context of fantasies (in his magnum opus about Byrd’s keyboard music Oliver Neighbour contentiously regards the terms fantasy and voluntary as interchangeable) and it brings the disc to a satisfactory close, presenting an attractive case for a piece that can sometimes be made by lesser players to sound a bit dry.

It remains to mention the two sets of variations on popular tunes that Booth places centrally in this programme. The carman’s whistle is an amiable ramble through the English countryside up alongside the carman on his horse and cart, as Booth responds appropriately to Byrd’s deceptively artless commentary on the tune, in both their cases concealing a more profound response. In the magnificent John come kiss me now Booth again does Byrd proud as the composer reaches forward across the centuries with some of his bluesiest cadences. Byrd’s variations are themselves varied throughout the piece, and his creative virtuosity is reflected in Booth’s measured but committed response.

Early in this review I suggest that Booth approaches Byrd’s works with affection. It is this approach that gives rise to a fine recording that is both likeable and recommendable.

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Giornovich: London Concertos

Pink chrysanthemum

Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort
65:46
Delphian DCD34219
Concertos 13, 14 & 15, Villageoises de Julie with five variations

I rarely comment on CDs with which I have had the slightest involvement, but very, very occasionally, there is such a disconnect between one’s impression of music as one is typesetting it (and inevitably hearing it played back by the computer) and the reaction to hearing the finished results that it is impossible not to write something. I have been aware of Bojan as an ascendent artist for many years and have followed his rise to some of the most important jobs on the HIP scene; what I not realised until I heard this recording is just what a fantastic violinist he actually is! Eager to champion one of Croatia’s most important musical figures of the classical period, he and his augmented Illyrian Consort present world premiere recordings of three violin concertos (two in A and one in E), which he augments with a set of solo variations on a folk tune. The performances are world class – especially impressive is the impeccable upper register, string crossing virtuosity. The modest band provides perky, upbeat tuttis and a warm, rich halo to the solos; they accompany, but not in some artificial, sempre piano way – they are as much part of the venture as the heroic soloist. The whole is captured by the Delphian engineers and editors with remarkable clarity and precision – somehow they have achieved presence without being invasive, the sound is immediate without capturing Čičić’s breathing. Playing of this calibre deserves nothing less!

Brian Clark

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Recording

Telemann: Christmas Oratorios

Floral design

Monika Mauch, Nicole Pieper, Georg Poplutz, Klaus Mertens SATB, Kölner Akademie directed by Michael Alexander Willens
76:50
cpo 555 254-2
TVWV 1:745, 926, 1251, 1431

It is both hugely rewarding and insightful when the spotlight turns on a little-known cantata cycle alongside progressive musicological studies. This fine recording does just that, with three delightful, seasonal examples from the librettist Albrecht Jacob Zell (1701-54), who gave his name to a cycle known as either “Zellischer” or “Oratorischer” Jahrgang from 1730/1. The latter definition is quite telling, as these resplendent works have seemingly imported qualities from the opera, and perhaps more appositely the Passion-oratorios of the time, with the clever use of allegorical figures to add pertinent commentaries to the festive drama unfolding before us. These are quite unconventional cantatas in form, and offer the composer a broad palette of musical expression; Telemann required no more prompting, responding to the hybrid stylistic elements with some ravishing and inspired “Tonal Painting”. The opening work with its dazzling chorale medley: Dictum-Aria-Recitative-Dictum-Recitative, wrapped around the familiar “Uns ist ein Kind geboren” is an excellent festive intro, and displays a compositional freedom, possibly promoted by the quasi-operatic, oratorial style. The aria, “Mein Herze wallet vor lechzendem Vergnügung” (My Heart swells with languishing delight, Track 8), sung by Andacht (Worship) is truly enchanting! The second “Oratorio” opens with a most perfect musical depiction of the shimmering glow of the “Sun of faith”. As an old conductor friend used to say, these are works filled with such “niceties” i. e. charming and clever (alert) responses to the textual content and drama; here with bright sheen and imagination. The final cantata (from a later Neumeister cycle of circa 1742-1744 (Musikalisches Lob Gottes (in der Gemeinde des Herrn), published in Nürnburg in 1744), is set with much more modest forces, only soprano, alto, bass with strings and continuo. It feels more adherent to the conventional formal layout than the first three works, and yet it finds its sequential seasonal placement, and typical expression of humble joy, found in similar pieces from this time of year. All in all, an inspired and inspiring exposition of three wonderful cantatas from one of the lesser-known of the 20-odd cycles Telemann managed to pen during his extraordinarily productive lifetime, ending with a modest work from the later cycle. These are most welcome seasonal delights with a definite musical sparkle, to which all the soloists and instrumentalists respond with notable skill!

David Bellinger

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Recording

Heinrich Scheidemann, Samuel Scheidt: Cantilena Anglica Fortunae

Floral design

Yoann Moulin harpsichord
55:24
Ricercar RIC394

This is the first in a new series of recordings by Ricercar devoted to German Baroque keyboard music. Scheidt and Scheidemann both worked with Sweelinck in Amsterdam before returning to Halle and Hamburg respectively; this disc alternates groups of pieces by both of them. The CD cover writes of the ‘introverted Scheidt and the more flamboyant Scheidemann’ but the choice of works and the playing here seems to invert this binary divide. Apart from a lively Gagliarda, the Scheidemann tracks – four Praeambula and his Pavana Lachrymae – are played rather solemnly and a touch too carefully for my taste. There is more flamboyance on display in some Scheidt variation sets, particularly those on Also geht’s, also steht’s and O Gott, wir danken deiner Güt. It is a pity that the track change has been mis-positioned between the latter and the previous track. The most interesting piece is probably the final extended Fantasia on Palestrina’s Io son ferito which displays some challenging rising and falling chromatic fourths, which also stretch the temperament. Moulin plays on an Andreas Ruckers copy by Philippe Humeau which works very well for the music and recording quality is excellent. The playing is a bit too safe and respectful overall, but this is a useful introduction to early Baroque German keyboard music.

Noel O’Regan

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Recording

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre: Chamber Music from the Brossard Collection

Floral design

The Bach Players
67:27
Coviello Classics COV 81915

Jacquet de la Guerre has become well-known to us as a composer of harpsichord music but this recording of six trio and solo sonatas by The Bach Players is a real revelation. These works were not published – Graham Sadler in the liner notes suggests that they came ahead of any French market for such pieces – but were lent by the composer to Sébastien Brossard, whose copies survive. Four are trio sonatas and two are for solo violin and continuo. The latter have a conventional division into movements but the trio sonatas are through-composed, with short sections of contrasting texture and melody. All are highly inventive melodically, with rich harmony and a liking for parallel thirds and sixths. Italian influence is clear, but Jacquet de la Guerre has made her own very distinctive synthesis with the French style. The group’s beautifully rich sound has been excellently captured with close miking by the recording engineers of Coviello, using the resonant acoustic of St. Michael’s Church Highgate. There is a wonderful unity of purpose among the four players which extends to Silas Wollston’s sensitive playing on the harpsichord of quasi-improvisatory preludes and a tocade, leading directly into four of the sonatas. This is highly accomplished music, played with love and great attention to detail on this recording. Do listen to it.

Noel O’Regan

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Recording

Reincken: Toccatas, Partitas & Suites

Floral design

Clément Geoffroy harpsichord
73:00
L’Encelade ECL1705

Despite his artistic and financial successes, the Dutch-born but Hamburg-based Reincken has left very little music behind – something which, on the strength of this recording, is a great shame. In order to fill up his programme, Clément Geoffroy has included a number of unauthenticated works as well as the few whose attribution is secure. Among the latter, two particularly fine extended sets of variations stick out, those on Die Meierin (the same tune as Froberger’s Mayerin) and on the Balletto. Both are highly inventive and show what Reincken’s improvised performances must have been like. There is also a C major suite which shows strong Italo-German traits. A second suite in A minor, taken from an anthology by Roger, sounds quite different – much more French – and is probably not by Reincken (Geoffroy suggests Pachelbel). Two unauthenticated toccatas are also rather fine: one uses the stylus fantasticus while the other is more Frescobaldi-like. With such a small corpus, it is difficult to establish Reincken’s style, but all of the music on this CD is worth listening to, and it is a good representation of Northern European keyboard styles around the turn of the 18th century. Geoffroy’s playing is exemplary, as is the recording quality. He plays on a Ruckers copy by Emile Jobin which provides the right mixture of resonance and clarity for Reincken’s music. The tuning is a bit sour in the opening track (the stylus fantasticus toccata) but otherwise it works very well. This is an attractive compilation with some real exuberance and virtuosity in the playing and is highly welcome.

Noel O’Regan

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Recording

Josquin Masses Gaudeamus & Ami Boudichon

Dark green flowers

The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Philips
66:30
Gimell CDGIM050

These are the thirteenth and fourteenth Josquin Masses to be recorded by the Tallis Scholars and that experience certainly tells. These are marvellously confident performances with great clarity in the singing, picked up by the excellent recording made in Merton College Chapel, Oxford. There is a particularly strong sense of line which carries right through each phrase without faltering, so very important for this music, and great unanimity between the two/three singers on each line. These two four-voice Masses show a particularly striking contrast. L’Ami Boudichon is one of Josquin’s earliest masses, based on a very simple five-note bawdy song in C mode. Despite the restriction of the material, Josquin manages a continuous variety, with strong ostinato-based build-ups at the ends of movements and a strikingly optimistic mood. Composed some twenty years later, the more sombre Missa Gaudeamus shows the full panoply of Josquin’s contrapuntal devices, with lots of intricate canons. It is based on an extended plainsong in the minor-sounding Dorian mode, of which the easily-recognisable first six notes are most prominent; there is much more harmonic depth and complexity, with some beautifully-sung duets. The two Masses make an excellent pairing and this disc is certainly a very worthy addition to the group’s Josquin series. This is an essential recording of some sublime music.

Noel O’Regan

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Recording

Handel: Ode for St Cecilia’s Day

Floral design

Carolyn Sampson soprano, Ian Bostridge tenor, Polish Radio Choir, Dunedin Consort, conducted by John Butt
61:15
Linn CKD 578

Handel’s glorious paean to the patron saint of music has understandably been the subject of numerous recordings. Without claiming to have kept track of all of them, my loyalty has tended to remain with Trevor Pinnock’s 1985 recording with Felicity Lott and Anthony Rolfe Johnson as outstanding soloists. Coming back to it yet again by way of comparing it with this version from John Butt, I was once again struck by the remarkable vitality and freshness it has retained over the three decades since it was issued.

Butt’s new recording represents a departure from his usual work with his Dunedin Consort insofar as it emanates from his artistic directorship of the 2018 Misteria Paschalia Festival held in Kraków in Poland, an edition that made a special feature of music from Britain. As a mark of co-operation the choral section of the Dunedin’s is restricted to only two singers per part, who are supplemented by members of the Polish Radio Choir. They prove to be a responsive, well-balanced body who respond to Butt’s direction with enthusiasm, and whose English pronunciation and diction prove to be first class. One of the major pleasures of Butt’s performance is tempos that with one exception strike this listener as being ideally judged, avoiding the extremes that are presently so much a part and parcel of the performance of Baroque music. The exception comes with the soprano air ‘But oh! What art can teach’, which I feel Butt takes at a tempo that is marginally too stately and one that induces Carolyn Sampson to apply excessive vibrato, also a lesser problem with both singers elsewhere.

Elsewhere both she and Ian Bostridge contribute greatly to the success of the performance. Dryden’s wonderfully illustrative and mimetic text is ideally suited to Bostridge’s inimitable way with the English language and his singing of the opening accompagnato ‘When nature…’ and the stentorian air ‘The trumpet’s loud clangor’ are object lessons in communication. Sampson brings great sensitivity to the gentler, contrasting soprano airs, ‘The soft complaining flute’ in particular being enchantingly phrased and floated, the gentle trills expressing the ‘warbling lute’ beguilingly brought off.

In addition to the ode, the disc includes a very fine performance of the Concerto grosso, op. 6, no. 4, again notable for well-judged tempos, the beautifully played and shaped Largo e piano (iii) an object lesson in the right speed for an 18th-century largo. This is most certainly a recording to place alongside the long-serving Pinnock, its qualities further enhanced by notes from John Butt that manage to be both scholarly and eminently readable, an increasingly rare phenomenon.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Antoine de Fevin: Missa Ave Maria & Missa Salve sancta parens

Dark green flowers

The Brabant Ensemble, conducted by Stephen Rice
Hyperion CDA68265
79’14

The French composer Antoine de Fevin was born around 1470 probably at Arras, where his father was an Alderman (although one source describes Antoine as being of Orleans), and he seems to have died by 1512, possibly late in 1511. He is therefore of that generation of Franco-Flemish polyphonists which thrived between Josquin and Palestrina. Besides the two masses which give the disc its snappy title, the programme also includes two motets: the six-part Ascendens Christus in altum and two versions of the composer’s most popular motet Sancta trinitas, Fevin’s original in four parts and an expansion into six by his younger contemporary Arnold von Bruck.

Missa Ave Maria is based on the well-known motet by Josquin. Originally published in 1515, it appeared in an accessible modern edition put out by Annie Bank of Amsterdam in 1950 (from which your reviewer sang as a callow bass in the early 1960s). While it shares music (as at the end of the Credo) and stylistic traits (passages of paired voices) with the older composer (Fevin was noted during the sixteenth century as a follower of Josquin) there are other passages such as “qui tollis peccata mundi” in the third and final Agnus which seem to point towards the fuller polyphony and structural use of sequences in all parts developed in the music of later composers such as Gombert and particularly Clemens.

Attractive individual lines and strikingly successful sonorities, including an adroit use of homophony amongst the prevailing counterpoint, are to the fore in his motet Ascendens Christus where he exploits the possibilities of his chosen six-part scoring. This is a text that cries out to be illustrated musically, and Fevin himself rises to the occasion in depicting Christ as he was lifted up, favouring us with some of the Renaissance’s most exquisite writing for upper voices in three parts, complemented by a beautiful response from the lower voices. There had been doubt about the attribution to Antoine de Fevin of this motet but a source recently discovered has confirmed it. Although some passages sound modern for circa 1500, hence the justified uncertainty about the attribution to Fevin, there are also some mediaeval turns of phrase which peg the work to the period of Fevin’s lifetime. It is also important to mention the delightful settings of alleluia which occur in both sections of this radiantly beautiful bipartite work.

Fevin’s Sancta trinitas survives in no fewer than 41 sources, according to Grove including the abovementioned version expanded into six parts by Bruck. If Ascendens Christus sounds unlike the work of a follower of Josquin, this motet, with its prominent passages of paired voices, is most Josquinian, and is no harbinger of the innovations wrought by Gombert and his ilk a few decades later. The rather sparse initial passages give way to exultant and, within the limitations of writing for four parts, luxuriant polyphony at the final “speculum”. Bruck’s additional parts seem to gild this particular lily, though it is interesting to have the two settings juxtaposed.

A greater sense of continuity prevails in the Missa Salve sancta parens than in the Missa Ave Maria and this is perhaps it is because it is based on a plainchant rather than being tied to an entire motet, especially one by a composer from the previous generation, where structurally and stylistically there was more building upon individual episodes than, as with later composers, creating a more continuous narrative. The overall impression is still Josquinian but of a work that could only have been composed by a composer on the musical road progressing beyond Josquin. This is best illustrated in, again, the Agnus, where the austerely energetic duet which makes up Agnus II is followed by a positively luxuriant concluding Agnus III, where Fevin expressively exploits repetition and sequence in all four parts to impressive effect.

If the two masses have occasional longueurs among their many felicities, and Sancta trinitas – fine work that it is – comes across as one of those pieces which had more resonance for contemporaries than perhaps it has for posterity, nevertheless Ascendens Christus is simply stunning, and rewards repeated hearings. If it is indeed by Fevin, as seems proven, he has been insulted by having its attribution to him queried; that said, it is a work that is so striking even amongst his three other distinguished pieces on this disc, that the raising of quizzical eyebrows has perhaps been forgivable. In a venue with a slightly drier acoustic than on some of their recent recordings, the Brabant Ensemble make an excellent case for Fevin.

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Les maîtres du motet: Brossard & Bouteiller

Floral design

Les Arts Florissants, directed by Paul Agnew
67:05
harmonia mundi HAF 8905300

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he concentration on Paris as the hub of musical life has tended to obscure the work of French 17th- and 18th-century composers active in the provinces. The disc to hand includes music by two such composers, who if not totally neglected – both major works on the CD have received previous recordings – are not exactly household names. The better known is Sébastian de Brossard, but even he is today probably more famous as an indefatigable collector and historian who published the first French dictionary of music than as a composer. An aristocratic cleric, Brossard spent most of his life at the cathedral at Strasbourg, to where in 1687 he was one of those sent by Louis XIV to restore Catholicism after the re-capture of Alsace. In 1698 he went to Paris, hoping to be appointed maître de musique at Sainte Chapelle, but the post went to Charpentier. Brossard’s final post was at the cathedral in Meaux, where he died in 1730.

It is to Brossard that we owe the survival of the known sacred music of Pierre Bouteiller, who was born around 1655. A shadowy figure, he is first heard of as director of music at Troyes Cathedral in 1687. Following a period in the equivalent post at Châlons-en-Champagne, Bouteiller returned to Troyes, remaining there until 1698, when he moved to Paris. There he established himself as a performer on the viola da gamba ‘and other instruments’. Other than a commissioned Te Deum no record of Bouteiller’s being active as a composer in Paris exists, although he apparently remained in the city until his death, which occurred around 1717.

Brossard recounts a meeting with Bouteiller in Châlons, at which time the latter gave the collector manuscripts of 13 ‘excellent’ petits motets, and a ‘very good Mass for the Dead’ in exchange for Brossard’s recently published first book of motets. Brossard took great care of the manuscript, which he considered to be ‘one of the best I have’, the works included in it remaining all that is extant of Bouteiller’s output of sacred music. The present disc includes the Missa pro defunctis (Requiem), which is scored in five parts with continuo accompaniment. Many hearing it in this wonderful performance will likely consider Brossard’s description to be an exceptional example of masterly understatement. Anyone who regularly reads my reviews will know I’m not prone to hyperbole, but my verdict be that the work is a sublime masterpiece, a largely polyphonic setting in stile antico that throughout demonstrates Bouteiller’s mastery of contrapuntal technique and manipulation of varied textures, including telling touches of affective chromaticism. Especially lovely is the in alternatim setting of the Kyrie, the plainchant set off to great effect by the polyphony. Equally as impressive is Bouteiller’s response to his text, which concentrates on the consolatory and even uplifting, the latter exemplified by the buoyant, confident setting of a verse from Psalm 23 in the Graduel (‘Though I walk’ etc). Yet the overall impression left by this exquisitely lovely work is of heart-easing transcendence.

The major work of Brossard’s here is his Stabat Mater, a large-scale 8-part setting. Divided into 17 sections, it is richly diverse, ranging from grand motet passages like the opening to the chamber-like ‘O quam tristis’ a grief-filled setting of the utmost beauty for solo quartet. The final sections, at first deeply penitential then increasingly ecstatic, culminate in an animated radiance that brings this splendid work to a deeply satisfying peroration. In addition there are two further works by Brossard, a Miserere mei Deus in which two soprano soloists alternate verses with the choir, made especially effective by the recessed placing of the latter, and a 5-part a capella setting of Ave verum corpus, a tiny gem that the brings the disc to an ineffably satisfying close.

As already suggested the performances are outstanding, with beautifully balanced choral singing in the more fully-scored passages and unfailingly sensitive solo work from the seven soloists selected by Paul Agnew from within Les Arts Florissants. This is not only the most deeply affecting CD I’ve heard in some time but also unquestionably one of my records of the year.

Brian Robins