Author: EMR2015

Categories
Recording

Byrd: Consort Music and Songs

Dark green flowers

bFIVE Recorder Consort, Sunhae Im soprano
64:54
Coviello Classics COV91725

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]yrd’s 533 surviving works divide into five broad categories: Latin church music, English church music, keyboard music, consort music, and songs. There have been complete recordings of three of these repertories. Missing so far are the complete English church music and of the songs. Easy though it would be to round up all of Byrd’s Anglican repertory onto a couple of discs, the greater need is for a comprehensive recording of his large and disparate number of songs. Many are in published collections, but a good number survive only in manuscript. Those that were published in his lifetime tend to be partsongs of various types; those unpublished tend to be consort songs. There is some overlap between these two categories, as alternative versions survive for many songs. It is a repertory replete with outstanding pieces, and recordings have been made of similar repertories by other composers, but currently Byrd’s song oeuvre is spread across any number of commercial recordings. Some are on single discs devoted to his music alone like the one under review. Other songs make single or isolated appearances for Byrd on anthologies or themed discs which include works by several composers. It’s a mess. Meanwhile, we have to be grateful for recordings such as this one, albeit they include some songs which have been recorded several times already, but which also include at least one premiere recording. Usually, the accompanying consort is of viols, but occasionally it is of recorders, as is the case here. (Keyboards, cornetts, sackbuts and even saxophones – surprisingly successful – are not unknown.) It also happens routinely that such discs consist mainly of songs, but also include a selection of Byrd’s instrumental consort music. Contrariwise here, of the 21 numbered tracks, the majority – eleven – are the consort music of the title, and only ten are songs.

The recorders begin the disc with the third Fantasia a6, which Byrd published in his Psalmes, songs, and sonnets  of 1611. All three of Byrd’s six-part fantasias are represented, including the early example which is thought by most critics to be the original form of his motet Laudate pueri  from the Cantiones sacrae  published jointly with Tallis in 1575; though some dissenting voices assert that the motet came first. In any event, B-Five perform it as it survives instrumentally, and not with the small differences found in the published vocal version. (Of the two preceding recordings, the Rose Consort play it the former way, Phantasm the latter – misguidedly, in my opinion.) The recorders also play all five of Byrd’s surviving five-part In nomines, Browning, the five-part Pavan which is the original of Byrd’s First Pavan for keyboard, and an unnecessary modern arrangement of its galliard.

The disc’s premiere recording is of When first by force. Nothing in this repertory seems to come without the need for explanations. In those sources where the work survives as a consort song with a complete text, that text is a poem beginning I that sometime. However, other such sources that are fragmentary and lack any underlay give the title as When first by force  which is the text attached to it when it appears as a partsong in Byrd’s Songs of sundrie natures  from 1589. That text is the one used here.

Of lesser known songs seldom recorded, And think ye nymphs  survives only as a partsong – in Byrd’s 1589 Songs  – but is presented here in a frenetic version arranged for solo voice and recorders. An aged dame is a bona fide consort song with a text which teeters between the ghoulish and the surrealistic. Meanwhile How vain the toils  finds Byrd near the end of his career in his Psalmes, songs, and sonnets  of 1611 with a consort song in what is mainly a collection of partsongs, right at the top of his game with a work that manages to be both magisterial yet subtle.

Inevitably some more familiar items have been included. Though Amaryllis dance in green  is taken at one heck of a lick; sometimes one wonders whether such an interpretation is recorded more to showcase the performers than the music, for which it does little. Nearly as familiar is My mistress had a little dog  but here full credit goes to the musicians for playing up to Byrd’s obviously intended histrionics. Notable and creditable is the singer’s clearly audible and expressive drop of a fifth in the first line on the word “Royal”, a crucial rhetorical gesture by Byrd often glossed over by singers who lack the range for convincing lower notes.

The combination of soprano and recorders is not to everyone’s taste, and occasionally Sunhae Im’s slight vibrato grates against the smoother timbre of the higher recorders. That said, her experience as a Baroque opera specialist gives many of her interpretations considerable profundity. The sordid narrative of Susanna fair  which has so many contemporary resonances, unfolds quite rivetingly, and Ye sacred Muses  is an outstanding version of a song that seems always to draw the best out of whoever records it.

The many felicities, and the neglected gems brought to sparkle in the light, make this an album that is easy to recommend. The overall presentation is enhanced by notes provided in the form of an interview with Kerry McCarthy, a guarantee of omniscience and elegance. All the musicians show an aptitude for this repertory, so much so that one would hope for more discs from them of Byrd’s songs and consort music. A few of the former remain unrecorded, and although there have been two complete recordings of Byrd’s complete (sic) consort music, there are some fine incomplete settings in four parts of plainsong hymns that have had their missing treble part reconstructed and which deserve a commercial hearing.

Richard Turbet

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Book

Vania Dal Maso: Teoria e Pratica della Musica Italiana del Rinascimento

Dark green flowers

[Teorie musicali, 3] (LIM, 2017)
xxxiii+392pp
ISBN 9788870968880 €28

[dropcap]V[/dropcap]ania Dal Maso is a harpsichordist, musicologist and professor of musical theory. Her repertory includes rarely performed 14th- and 15th-century music, which she plays on very early instruments (including the clavicymbalum, clavicytherium, clavichord and positive organs). Since the line of transmission from medieval to modern music is not a direct one from teacher to pupil, she has researched, written and lectured on musical treatises and the didactic methods of early theorists. The present book is a distilled synthesis of this knowledge and experience, fitting the needs of her students and others.

It presents the underlying theories and resulting practices of Italian Renaissance music by discussing selected subjects as they were covered by various treatises (from Tinctoris and Gafurius in 1494 and 1496 to Lanfranco and Ganassi; from Aaron, Vicentino and Zarlino in the mid 1550s to Dalla Casa, Bassano and Diruta at the end of the century; from Cerreto and Banchieri in 1601 up to the later tracts of Banchieri, Diruta, Zacconi and others). In general, this strategy produces a modern tract that parallels in its own organization the approaches of the authorities discussed. The reader, like a learner of four centuries ago, proceeds from clefs to mensuration, proportions, modality, counterpoint and performance practice. The commentary, however, points out some of the essential ways in which the sources differ, and how the music of the 1500s differs from our mainstream classical music.

A single guide to such a non-homogeneous subject cannot actually give a modern musician the competence to deal in every specific case with solmisation, modal harmony, musica ficta, mensuration, Renaissance counterpoint, the controversial concrete calculation of intervals themselves, improvisation and ornamentation. It aims to offer readers as much guidance as they seek, depending on what they already know and need to know. The first thing to be learned is how interconnected these matters were. It provides bibliographical options for how to proceed in greater depth, where the choices would obviously relate to the music one wants to study.

It is definitely a book for Italian musicians – the curious, serious, or indeed studious. Some of the tables, diagrams and musical examples are helpful in themselves, but still require reading the text. Dal Maso’s writing is as clear as can be, while necessarily dense: she doesn’t have room to say things more than once! I ignored the author’s suggestion that one might read the chapters in any order and even skip some. Everything is integral to the subject. A Renaissance ‘post-grad’, having learned logic and rhetoric, progressed to the Quadrivium (mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy). Just when the modern reader thinks something is irrelevant he starts to lose the trail.

In fact, 16th-century Italian theory is highly relevant to much of the familiar early music we hear and play, certainly that of the entire 17th century. The note values and proportions of mensural notation constituted a valid system, necessary for the rhythmic complexities of polyphony and the contrasting note-density or meters of various voices, especially before there were scores; the method for naming notes invented by Guido d’Arezzo (991?-1033) persisted in hexachordal solmisation for over half a millennium because the note names (such as Bemi  and Befa, or Alamire) told singers where the semitones were (which unfortunately the staff alone does not do) and in which octave; the frequency ratios of notes to each other (intervals), the modes and modal harmony, counterpoint and musica ficta  all influence each other, and the rules governing them were in flux and often contested. Dal Maso goes far enough into each area to point out the implications. Players are constantly tempted to alter (or not to alter!) notes, when they should do so only after considering the characteristics of the mode of a particular voice, modulation to another, and the applicability of some norms of counterpoint only to those notes which are ‘on the beat’. Dal Maso’s presentation of counterpoint is excellent: she must have put a great deal of thought into how to illustrate it most meaningfully.

The easiest parts of this book may seem to be those on the improvisation of ornamentation, on turning the bare essential notes into complex virtuosic music. This comes towards the end. Again, if we think whatever we want goes, we actually need to immerse ourselves again and again in the descriptions and definitions collected here, the proportions, affects, and norms. (It would require a second book to include the rhetorical figures which every composer would have studied – probably in childhood; and yet another to cover the question of tunings.)

Odd as this may sound, we must try to view the norms of medieval and Renaissance music as more highly developed than ours. They produced effects that have disappeared entirely from music. Not everything progresses from the simple to the more complex over time. (I remind readers about De musica mensurabili. Manuale di notazione rinascimentale  by Francesco R. Rossi, reviewed in EMR  no. 159 (April 2014). This is a manual for the modern musician that teaches mensural notation through examples and exercises in transcription, followed by the answers and explanations necessary to test one’s understanding.)

I pass on a minor point from Dal Maso which might also amuse Italian readers. We wrongly assume that in terms such as semibreve, semitone or even semicircle, semi-civilized, and semiconscious, etc., that ‘semi’ means ‘half’. Originally it did not, and in early music it certainly did not. A breve could contain various numbers of semibreves, and semitones could be of many different sizes, all smaller than tones (measured by different ratios of the frequencies of the two notes producing variously defined enharmonic, chromatic, and diatonic ‘semitones’, differing by fractions of smaller intervals according to each theory of tuning). ‘Semi’, from medieval Latin semo, simply means ‘lesser’, not half. Italian words derived from semo  are scemo  [stupid, lacking in brains] and scemare  [diminishing, falling away].

I have only referred to some of the subjects of Dal Maso’s volume because there are too many to name. The table of contents is a detailed outline of the book, 6 pages long. It takes a while to locate a particular topic and it serves as a substitute for a general index to subjects and terminology, which the book does not have. But repeated use of this outline is itself a worthwhile guide to the subject matter as a sum of its parts.

The bibliography of primary sources is not alphabetical, but chronological (from 1494 to 1725); the secondary sources, translations from Latin, articles and site URLs are primarily Italian ones and sources the author herself used. There are two indices of names mentioned in the text – the first is chronological, giving their birth and death dates, from Pythagoras to Fux; the second is alphabetical and gives the pages for all references.

Towards the end of the book, Vania Dal Maso writes a thought-provoking reflection, which I will try to paraphrase. To communicate verbally one tries to understand a concept, and then to figure out how to transmit it efficaciously, this being automatically an internal to external process (from within to without). The listener (or reader, I assume) does the reverse, receiving the message expressed and recognizing or reconstructing its content. In music, however, these processes cannot possibly be automatic. Her purpose is to underline the need for input from a body of contemporary explicative sources. But I think that the processes are reciprocal and shared. The concept that the speaker (or writer or composer) will express has to be recognized by himself, so like the final listener, he has to externalize it for himself, or test it on himself, before writing it down or producing the sounds. And in all music played by more than one performer, each player is a listener as well as a transmitter, capturing and expressing simultaneously. (This is indeed an additional challenge to the blithe ‘falsism’ that music is a universal language!)

Barbara Sachs

Categories
Recording

Orlando Gibbons: fancies for the viol

Floral design

L’Acheron (consort of viols)
Ricercar RIC384
74’10

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he French consort of viols L’Acheron take their cheerful name from Greek mythology’s Acheron, the river of woe, one of the five rivers of Hades. More prosaically it is a real river that flows into the Ionian Sea. Cheerful or woeful, L’Acheron have produced one of the best discs, that I have ever heard, of music by Gibbons. Although I am a member of the Viola da Gamba Society, I am woefully – definitely not cheerfully – ignorant about the construction of what is probably my favourite instrument to listen to, but the inspiration for L’Acheron was “to construct a perfectly proportioned Consort of Viols according to the precepts current during the 17th century”. Certainly the sound they produce on their instruments – “manufactured between 2012 and 2017” – as a result of all their research, is most satisfying. Thankfully their interpretations of this selection of Gibbons’s consort music match the quality of their instruments.

They begin with the six-part Fantasia, no 39 in MB xlviii, Orlando Gibbons: consort music  edited by John Harper, which is enigmatic to the volume’s editor. In the absence of any provenance besides its single source, he worries that it might have been some form of vocal work transcribed for the viols, and he settles uneasily on the title given in that source. It is comfortably the longest of Gibbons’s consort pieces, and L’Acheron play it at the speed of the pavan which is implied in its opening bars. This leads to a duration of ten minutes, but whereas in less committed hands this period of time, and length of piece, could drag, the intensity of this superb performance attends to every detail yet maintains a momentum that draws the listener into Gibbons’s narrative. There are two more of Gibbons’s fantasias in six parts; neither of them is anywhere near as long as no 39 and they are more securely instrumental. There are also fantasias in two, three (including a pair “for the Double Base”) and four parts. Variety is provided by other works in forms other than the fancies, or fantasias, given in the disc’s title. Two of Gibbons’s three In nomines in five parts are performed. The information about both of them is misprinted in the booklet. The one in “d minor” is no 27 in Harper’s edition, not 25; and the one in “g minor” is not “a 6” as stated. That said, the latter joins the Fantasia  a6 no 39 as the equally outstanding item on the disc, being a sublime piece of music full of beguiling suspensions and spine-tingling melodies, played at exactly the right tempo to reveal every exquisite harmonic moment, while maintaining a purposeful momentum. Three dances are included: the six-part pavan and galliard pairing, and the galliard in three parts. The disc ends with another classic, the variations in six parts on the song Go from my window  which is worthy to stand beside Byrd’s setting for keyboard.

Unless, to paraphrase The Rolling Stones, you want or need a complete recording of Gibbons’s consort music (which does exist) there could not be a better selection on a single disc than the recording under review. The booklet’s notes are slightly one-eyed in their view of Gibbons in the continuum of Elizabethan and Jacobean consort composers, mentioning Tye only once, and paying no attention to his predecessors such as Parsons and Byrd, all three of whom composed outstanding consort music, without which Gibbons could not have achieved what he did in this medium. Otherwise, the combination of Gibbons’s matchless consort music, L’Acheron’s fine interpretations, and the beautiful sound of their instruments, renders this disc irresistible and incomparable.

Richard Turbet

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Categories
Recording

Capricornus: Jauchzet dem Herrn alle Welt

Floral design

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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Categories
Recording

Schelle: Actus Musicus auf Weyh-Nachten

Floral design

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

Floral design

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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Categories
Recording

Bach: Magnificat in E flat | Missa in F

Floral design

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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Categories
Recording

Caldara: Motetti a due o tre voci op. 4

Floral design

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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Categories
Recording

Ludford: Missa Dominica

Dark green flowers

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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Categories
Recording

De Croes: Motetten

Floral design

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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