Category: Recording

198:26 (3 CDs in a wallet)
Tactus TC 560380
12 masses involving 11 choirs and directors

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his comprehensive set of CDs recording of all the Masses by the Bolognese composer Camillo Cortellini (1561-1630) is a real community effort and, with most of the enormous cast list of choirs coming from Bologna and district, a testimony to the active choral scene in that city. Although with music of the late 16th and early 17th century it is just conceivable that all the musicians could be collaborating on some huge polychoral scores, this is not the case, and in fact each ensemble takes on individual masses. So far, so good, but sadly the quality of the singing is very variable ranging from the pretty woeful to the not bad. The fact that they each take their turn has the advantage that you are not stuck with any one choir for too long, but the disadvantage is that some of the performances are really not very easy to listen to and don’t really do their composer justice. And this is another snag. In the performances presented here with voices and organ, it is not clear that Cortellini lives up to the claims made for his music in the programme notes. It is thoroughly competent and melodious, but I didn’t feel he was the lost genius that clearly the organizers of this ambitious project felt he was. Cortellini was a predecessor of Monteverdi in the employ of the Gonzagas, so I am prepared to believe that there is more to his music than is apparent here. I admire the spirit behind this ambitious project, but we miss the assurance of a single group, who would have become thoroughly conversant with Cortellini’s idiom over the course of recording all this music, and would have perhaps been more persuasive advocates of his virtues as a composer. Frankly most of the singing here just isn’t up to scratch.

3444D. James Ross

Graindelavoix, Björn Schmelzer
67:00
Glossa GCD P32113
+de La Hèle  Kyrie, Sanctus & Agnus Dei (Missa Praeter rerum seriem), Duarte Lobo  Agnus Dei (Missa Dum aurora) & Ruimonte  Agnus Dei (Missa Ave Virgo Sanctissima)

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you like your early 17th-century music sung as a certain hard core of aficionados believe 15th-century music was sung, then this is for you. By this I mean the earthy delivery, swooping pitching, constant wobbling ornaments familiar from Graindelavoix’s previous recordings of music such as the Messe de Notre Dame, applied to the music of the late Renaissance. Well actually it is not as simple as that. The sections for solo voices seem to inhabit a much more Renaissance world, although they still use the glissandi and wobbly ornaments, which had they ever been widely employed, seem to me upsettingly out of place in High Renaissance vocal lines. Meanwhile the sections for full choir are something of an evolutionary throw-back.

The best I can say about the group’s approach to this music is that it is challengingly unconventional and provides a strikingly alternative view of late Renaissance polyphony. Even in their own controversial terms these performances seem to me to have technical shortcomings, in that the singers are sometimes far from unified in their movements and there are occasional scatterings of concluding consonants for which even an amateur choir would be rebuked. As the musical and philosophical offspring of groups such as the Ensemble Organum whose groundbreaking work I admired, I want to like Graindelavoix’s recent recordings more, but there is an intellectual fuzziness and a musical slap-dash quality about them which runs quite contrary to their rigorous predecessors.

D. James Ross