Tag: Choral music

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Recording

de Peñalosa: Lamentationes

Peñalosa Lamentations CD cover

New York Polyphony
56:41
BIS-2407 SACD

This exceptionally fine recording provides a convincing taster for the works of Francisco de Peñalosa, a leading Spanish composer of the early sixteenth century. The four male singers produce a beautifully blended and characterful sound, being particularly careful to unify vowel sounds and producing some really quiet singing in places. Their countertenor, Geoffrey Williams, blends well, his voice neither dominating nor inhabiting a different vocal world, as can sometimes happen. All four show exceptional control in long-breathed phrases while their singing brings the texts to life, with great clarity in enunciating the words; recording quality is also excellent. They sing two of Peñalosa’s three surviving lamentations and three movements from his Missa L’homme armé, as well as two short motets, one an attractive three-voice Song of Songs setting, Unica est columba mea. While it would have been good to have had the third lamentation and the other Mass movements, the group compensates by giving us a beautifully sombre Stabat mater by Juan Escobar (only the first two verses are set) and two pieces by Guerrero, his four-voice Quae est ista and the lively villancico Antes que coma’is a Dios. These show us how Peñalosa’s music links with that of his contemporary Escobar and the much later Guerrero, with all three echoing aspects of the style of Josquin des Prez. There are some excellent liner notes by Ivan Moody.  Highly recommended.

Noel O’Regan

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Recording

Palestrina: Lamentations – Book 2

Cover of Cinquecento recording of Palestrina Lamentations vol. 2

Cinquecento Renaissance Vokal
72:11
hyperion CDA68284

Over recent years several of Cinquecento’s recordings have gone through my hands. Outstanding singers as they are, performing sometimes revelatory repertory, their interpretations can sound monochromatic and be rhythmically rigid. In the wrong hands, or indeed voices, Palestrina’s Lamentations could be conveyed in a way that does them no favours texturally and as regards tempo could simply plod. Thankfully Cinquecento are at their most insightful and alert, giving this book of Palestrina’s Lamentations as fine a recording as the Choir of Westminster Cathedral give the Third Book on the same label (CDA67610). The fact that there are seventy tracks, and that only the final track lasts for over two minutes, plays to Cinquecento’s strengths. They respond sensitively to Palestrina’s varied scoring within each of the nine Lectiones, from three to eight voices, so although they adhere to steady tempi, these reveal the subtleties of his homophony and polyphony and, thanks to this approach, gorgeous harmonies are allowed to glow as the singers respond flexibly to the ebb and flow dictated by the texts. Any interpretations of this repertory will be of their time, and attitudes will inevitably change, but I cannot imagine a better presentation of this music, though it should be emphasized that the very differently constituted Choir of Westminster Cathedral provide an equally fine interpretation in their own terms on the recording mentioned above. Meanwhile Cinquecento’s well engineered disc is recommended with no reservations. Palestrina’s sheer genius is better expressed in this intense music, audibly influenced by his Franco-Flemish predecessors back to Josquin, than in his more public mainstream music in the – sometimes blander – High Renaissance style. For all that there are seventy brief tracks, interest never palls. As a commercial recording, this is perfection.

Richard Turbet

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Sheet music

Francesco Gasparini: Mass for Five Treble Voices

Gasparini Mass for five treble voices

Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 208
Edited by Christine R. Howlett
x, four plates, 80pp.
A-R Editions, Inc. ISBN 978-1-9872-0281-6 $150

I have known about this work for many, many years so it is a real pleasure to welcome a fine edition of it. Unusual not only for its scoring (SSSAA & Basso contiuo) but also the fact that it is a full mass (with Credo AND Agnus Dei), it is – as Christine Howlett says in her fine introduction to the work – a showstopper for the female singers of the Pietà in Venice, where Gasparini was maestro di coro from 1710. There are solos and duets but much of the work actually does use a five-part texture, though the composer is careful to deploy the voices in a variety of combinations to maximise aural variety, including having two or more voices sing passages in unison. All in all, this is an excellent edition of a very exciting work and I sincerely hope that it can be made available at bulk discount price to female choirs who will simply love it!

Brian Clark

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Recording

Michael Haydn Collection

Cover of the boxed set of Michael Haydn

28 CDs in a cardboard box
Brilliant Classics 95885

Yes, you read the heading correctly – this set comprises 28 CDs of music by Michael Haydn! Best known for having a more famous brother, or (more flatteringly though “let’s not exaggerate”) the composer whom Mozart thought highly enough of to complete a set of duets for violin and viola, Michael Haydn really hasn’t had the best of press.

Now, at an amazing price of less than £2 per disc, you can totally immerse yourself in his soundworld. Unsurprisingly, this is NOT a Suzuki- or Koppmen-like methodical survey of the complete works; rather, it is a bringing together of various recordings from a number of companies (hänssler, oehms, and cpo, to name but a few) with period instrument performances alongside those by more “traditional” choirs and chamber orchestras; the opera is “modern” (with a HIP conductor to help), while the Singspiels are wholly HIP; two volumes of the complete string quintets (another overlapping interest with Mozart) feature extremely fine gut strung playing, while the quartets are played on steel. A modest booklet gives a biography of the composer and describes each of the discs; the card cover for each gives full information of the original recording.

As someone who has always enjoyed Haydn’s music (I remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing up the first time I heard a BIS recording of masses with oboe band!) I found the journey through these discs (some of which I had actually reviewed before) very enjoyable; his church music is especially attractive and it does not surprise me that it is found in archives across the German-speaking world. I did find myself tiring of amorphous non-HIP basslines and tiered dynamics, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the music, which in general is very high.

I recommend this to anyone into Classical music (in the strict sense) – I remember giving a concert in Dundee in 1991 in which we challenged the audience to identify which pieces we played and sung were by Mozart or not by Mozart; not a single person got the answer correct . If you played any of the present CDs as background music to a dinner party, I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn that it wasn’t Mozart too!

Brian Clark

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Recording

Music by Cipriano Rore

CD cover of Blue Heron da Rore madrigals recording

da Rore: I madrigali a cinque voce
Blue Heron
120:49 (2 CDs in a card folder)
Blue Heron BHCD 1009

de Rore: Missa “Vivat Felix Hercules”
Weser-Renaissance Bremen
69:47
cpo 777 989-2

Blue Heron’s recordings of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks resulted in five compact discs which received acclaim and prizes, including the first and so far only instance of the Gramophone Early Music Award being made to an American vocal ensemble. It was therefore with a great sense of anticipation that their next major project, Cipriano de Rore’s complete book of madrigals in five parts, 1542, has been awaited. Unsurprisingly they deliver in spades, both in performance and in presentation, with a booklet including erudite but readable and informative essays by Jessie Ann Owens and Scott Metcalfe. Rore comes over as a natural composer of madrigals, and Blue Heron have the versatility to do his music ample justice. Perhaps sensitive to prospective purchasers contemplating the prospect of up to twenty madrigals in identical scoring being sung off the reel, Blue Heron preface each madrigal with the original texts, the majority by Petrarch, being read by Alessandro Quarta; suffice to say he declaims them as effectively as Blue Heron subsequently sing them. Rore’s 1542 collection was famously innovative, with its intense engagement between the music and the words unprecedented in secular vocal music, and it set the standard, including the use of five vocal parts, for the more serious type of madrigal till the seventeenth century. Basically his madrigals are a fusion of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic style which, as we hear on Weser-Renaissance’s disc, he himself exploited in his sacred music, with the lighter, airier, Italian style. Whereas some such fusions simply refuse to “fuse” in the wrong hands, Rore’s collection exhibits a high standard throughout. This makes it very hard to single out individual works to recommend. Thanks to the versatility and sensitivity of Blue Heron’s singers, and to Scott Metcalfe – the most stylish conductor that I can remember seeing (in Cambridge, 2016) – every work receives detailed individual attention. A work such as Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno could pass superficially as a Franco-Flemish motet, while Perseguendomi Amor al luogo usato comes across as what posterity would come to regard as typically madrigalian.

Weser-Renaissance recording of de Rore's Mass - cover of the booklet

Weser-Renaissance’s disc is a different kettle of fish. Partly this reflects Rore’s own versatility as a composer. Although nothing quite beats the frisson of a live performance, one benefit of recordings is that one can listen to performances more than once and, if desired, do so soon after the first hearing, as many times as one wants. This certainly worked for me regarding Weser-Renaissance’s disc. At a first hearing I thought that the performances were inexpressive and stodgy, and the music, especially the Mass, turgid. Unwilling to sound off after a single unsatisfactory hearing, I listened again and the fog began to lift. Come a third helping I had reached my current state of admiration for both the singing and the music. The catalyst occurred during the second session with the electrifying music set to the words “miserere nobis” in Agnus I and II, and again to “dona nobis pacem” in Agnus III. Now I found myself able to listen in a different way, to hear the light and shade in the motets, and to appreciate further impressive passages of writing in Pater noster and especially Da pacem, Domine. In critical mode, I still feel that in the Gloria and Credo of his Mass, Rore is somewhat of a prisoner to his motto “Vivat felix Hercules secundus, dux Ferrariae quartus” which is treated as a Soggetto cavato during the Mass, in the manner of Josquin’s Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae. But overall it is a fine work, interspersed with several estimable motets, featuring imaginative scoring expressed through expert polyphony with judiciously placed sections of homophony. Weser-Renaissance perform it all sonorously ensuring clarity within Rore’s sumptuous textures.

Richard Turbet

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DVD

Lully: Te Deum, Biber: Missa Salisburgensis

Cover of the DVD of Biber and Lully

Les Pages du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, Collegium 1704, Collegium Vocale 1704, dir. Václav Luks
DVD CVS012
89:00

Although this is a Versailles production, the performances were filmed in Rome’s rather gorgeous Basilica San Giovanni in Laterano. I have two reservations about the performance practice on view. Are theorbo and harp really appropriate continuo instruments for either piece, and should both works really sound at the same pitch? Is this pitch (415) actually correct for either of them? Apart from that, the performances themselves are very good.

I have rather more issues with the format and the use made of it. Particularly if a concert is to be filmed, someone has to think about what it looks like. Someone should have told the conductor to re-tie his tie before he went on stage and also that his light brown suit looked pretty awful in the context of everyone else’s black, and the singers should have been warned to continue to look engaged and not to stare blankly into the middle distance when not directly involved in the performance.

And the potential of the medium has scarcely had its surface scratched. There are no extras, no subtitles and the encores (repeats of sections of the mass and which need not have been included) are not identified. In addition, the camera-work is quite pedestrian and there is no real attempt to convey the spatial aspects of the Biber.

So not a visual success I’m afraid, though the booklet does offer the information that should have been on the screen.

David Hansell

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Recording

Amadio Freddi: Vespers (1616)

CD booklet cover for Freddi Vespers

The Gonzaga Band, Jamie Savan
58:10
resonus RES10245
+ Castello, Donati, A & G Gabrieli, Grandi & Biagio Marini

This recording is another triumph for Jamie Savan and his Gonzaga Band. The research on Freddi and the way the performing edition for these elegant and tuneful movements – largely taken from Freddi’s Messa, vespro et compieta (Venice: Amadino 1616) – is excellently presented in five dense pages of informed and practical scholarship of a high order, which informs the whole enterprise. This is a model of how scholarship and performance should complement one another

We are given details of the sources, editions, instruments, pitch and temperament used. Particularly interesting is the use of a digital Hauptwerk organ running samples from the Nachini organ in S. Maria d’Alleito at Isola in Slovenia and played by Steven Devine. In a recording that itself is digitally created, I can see nothing wrong with using such an instrument, though I wonder what it feels like to sing or play next to it where there is no wind reservoir ‘breathing’ with you. The only other instruments alongside the six voices are Jamie Savan (cornetto) and Oliver Webber (violin), who play Freddi’s entwined and imitative writing in a way that not only imitates the florid vocal lines, but gives the impression of a very much larger instrumental ensemble. The richness of the overall texture created with such slender resources is one of the appealing things about this performance.

Just a violin and a cornetto with the organ was what Freddi had at his disposal when the forces at S. Antonio, Padua where he worked from 1592 to 1614, were reduced to keep the music establishment solvent. The combination appears again as the basic instrumental group hired in for the feast of the Assumption at S. Teonisto in Treviso, where he had moved in 1615, and is a combination that appears in places in the writing of Heinrich Schütz, for example.

The psalms Savan has chosen from the collection are those proper to a Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and as in the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers, he has interspersed the psalms with works for single voices, and a number of sonatas by Donati, Marini  and Castello together with some brief intonazioni by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli and a motet by Grandi. This is welcome, as fascinating though it is to hear the Freddi works, the voice and instrument combinations are limited and the textures and idioms feel much more samey than the widely varied styles of Monteverdi’s work – but then Monteverdi was trying to display the maximum number of ways the plainsong could be treated, which was not part of Freddi’s game plan. After repeated listenings, I found the music tuneful but not essentially memorable, though some of the instrumental sonatas and the solo motet by Grandi raised the game.

As before with the Gonzaga Band, Fay Newton’s contributions steal the show. Hardly any other soprano has her wonderful voice: light, bright and flexible, yet capable of astonishing changes of colour and mood. This is not to say that the other voices are not excellent – they are equally well-matched. So this is another example of how to create a wonderful but largely unrecognised musical world, where voices and instruments combine to create big effects with minimal forces. In today’s financially squeezed circumstances there is much to lean and admire. Plus ça change.

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Josquin: Missa Mater Patris | Bauldeweyn: Missa Da pacem

CD booklet cover for Josquin and Bauldeweyn

The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips
72:30
Gimell CDGIM 052
+Brumel Mater Patris, Plainchant Da pacem

There is so much that is fine about this recording, i.e. everything, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Best perhaps with the pieces themselves. The Missa Mater Patris by Josquin Des Pres – if indeed it be by him – is an astounding creation. Written in four parts, with a fifth added for the third Agnus Dei, it is unique among his masses in referring to a work by another composer, Antoine Brumel, who was seemingly only a decade younger than Josquin. Because it is unique among Josquin’s masses, both in provenance and in musical style, it is inevitable that the revisionist police come sniffing round, eager to remove it from Josquin’s canon. Scarcely less impressive, the Missa Da pacem survives with attributions to Mouton, Josquin and Bauldeweyn in early sources, and throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries it was hailed as one of Josquin’s greatest compositions. Then in 1972, according to Peter Phillips’s cogent notes, Edgar Sparks established that it was the work of Noel Bauldeweyn, who flourished during Josquin’s lifetime. There is a commercial recording of four of his masses by the excruciatingly named but capable Beauty Farm, an ensemble based in Austria, on Fra Bernardo FB1709761, a double album.

What of the music itself? Mater Patris, the euphonious three-part motet by Brumel on which the Missa Mater Patris is based, is constructed largely of duets followed by short passages in all three parts. Josquin’s fuller punctuations tend to be homophonic, with harmonies and textures that glow gloriously, a quality that sets it apart from his earlier more polyphonic masses. Particularly memorable – one wants to say catchy but the context might be too serious – is his response to the word Hosanna and, while Brumel’s setting of the word “exaudi” lurks throughout the mass, here Josquin gives it full rein. Peter Phillips’s notes are excellent and, although I would take with a pinch of salt his suggestion that Josquin’s setting of Hosanna exhibits playfulness, it certainly shows a human side to this most technically assured of composers. While still showing maximum homage to Brumel, Josquin flexes his polyphonic muscles towards the end of the third Agnus in five parts, resulting in music emulated at the same point only by Palestrina and, particularly, Byrd. One corker of a dissonance at 4’05 left this listener breathless.

Missa Da pacem also in four parts, based on the plainchant “Da pacem, Domine”, is eminently fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as Josquin even though it has been established as a work of Bauldeweyn. Besides those fine passages (especially the fabulous third Agnus in six parts) mentioned in his notes by PP, the first Kyrie, Benedictus and first Agnus in particular present the work of a composer who, at his best, is comparable in stature to Josquin as, say, Alonso Lobo is to Victoria.

Recently I attended a concert by The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips at the Cadogan Hall in London, at which they performed Palestrina’s neglected but superb Missa Ave Maria a6, plus motets by Byrd (including his disorientatingly discordant six-part setting of O salutaris hostia described amusingly but accurately in the programme notes as “bonkers”), Handl, Morales and Palestrina again, with a neglected Magnificat by him to conclude. Their live singing was as good as I have ever heard it, and the same can be said about their recorded singing on this disc. They present the best possible case for these two masses, supported by outstanding sound engineering in which every part is equally audible and perfectly balanced.

Even after all this exhaustive advocacy I am still not sure that I have done this superlative disc adequate justice. Suffice to say, everything about it is the best.

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Handel: Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate

Christina Landshamer, Anja Scherg, Reginald Mobley, Benedikt Kristjánsson, Andreas Wolf, Gaechinger Cantorey, Hans-Christoph Rademann
79:20
Carus 83.310

In addition to the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate on this packed CD we get a suite from ‘Il Pastor fido’ and the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne. All three works belong to the period when the composer was in the employ of the Elector of Hanover but was taking extended leave in London. The story of Handel’s alienation from the Electors of Hanover and his subsequent embarrassment when George I was translated to the British throne is a complete fiction, and it seems they were more than happy to see their favourite composer established in London. That Handel successfully applied himself to major courtly compositions in the latter days of the reign of Queen Anne helped him quickly to become the archetypal British national composer. While the Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate are pieces full of pomp designed to celebrate military victory, the Birthday Ode is more subtle indicating even a degree of affection between the Queen and her rising star composer. Opening with the sublime “Eternal Source of Light” given a fine performance here, this piece seems to show an awareness on the part of the 28-year-old composer that he is stepping into some dauntingly large shoes. In these performances, the orchestra of the Gaechinger Cantorey play with an impressive consistency and idiomatic style while the chorus too produce a pleasingly focussed and expressive sound. The soloists generally impress with their musicality and purity of tone, while the live recording made in the Liederhalle Stuttgart has a fine acoustic bloom with absolutely no audience noise.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Schütz: Psalmen & Friedensmusiken

Complete recording, Vol. 20.
Gerlinde Sämann, Isabel Schicketanz, Maria Stosiek, Dorothee Mields, David Erler, Stefan Kunath, Georg Poplutz, Tobias Mäthger, Felix Schwandtke, Martin Schicketanz, Dresdner Kammerchor, Instrumentalisten, Hans-Christoph Rademann
138:05 (2 CDs in a box)
Carus 83.278

These two CDs mark the end of Hans-Christoph Rademann’s complete recording of Schütz in collaboration with the publishers Carus that began in 2006. CD1 includes a number of psalm settings (127, 15, 124, 137, 85, 116, 8 and 7) and the Whitsun Sequence, while CD2 has commissioned works for public occasions, a couple of biblical dialogues, and music of a more personal nature, like Schütz’s ode to his wife who died (aged 24) in 1625. The astonishing variety of music represented here alerts us to the significance of Schütz’s oeuvre spanning the long period of his life from the madrigals composed under the influence of his teacher Gabrieli in Venice, through the richly scored psalms of his early maturity to the biblical dialogues and solo songs, with their minimalist instrumental colouring, of his middle age and maturity, and also to the breadth of his commissioned work.

The team of singers for the single-voice performances of much on these discs is a starry double SSATB quintet with Gerlinde Sämann, Isabel Schickentanz, Dorothee Mields, Georg Poplutz and Tobias Mätheger among their number. Many have connections to the Dresdener Kreuzchor or Kammerchor, like Rademann himself, and the Dresdener Kammerchor here is a fine foil to the solo voices with whom they share the same timbre as the opening psalm, Nisi Dominus (SWV 466), reveals at once. Psalm 15 (SWV 473) that follows it has two contrasting cori, one of alto & bass with two violins and violone, the other soprano & tenor with three trombones. In Psalm 137 – By the waters of Babylon – the verses of lament are given to the chorus tenors with four trombones while those that tell of the hanging up of their harps are sung by two solo sopranos and bass with two theorbos and continuo.

By contrast, the four choirs in the Latin Sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus – two sopranos & fagotto, two cornetti & bass, two tenors & three trombones, alto & tenor with two violins & violone – are not all heard together till the opening chords of verse 4, when Schütz’s characteristic G major to E major shift illuminates the words O lux, and some bars of 6/8 invigorate the heavenly rewards promised. CD1 ends with Psalms 8 and 7 and some of the niftiest trombone playing I have heard amongst other delights. The balance between voices and instruments is excellent, and the ringing clarity of the whole ensemble makes these fine performances under the experienced and sure-footed Rademann.

On CD2, big public works like Da pacem and an immense setting of the Benedicite with a wide variety of instrumental accompaniment to colour the text contrast with the chamber quality of Tugend ist der beste Freund (SWV 442), the strophic Danklied (SWV 368) with its instrumental ritornelli and the solo song Mit der Amphion zwar (SWV 501) that Schütz wrote on the death of his wife. Especially interesting in this category of smaller scale works are the two biblical dialogues – the well-known Easter dialogue (SWV 443) Weib, was weinest du with pairs of soprano and tenor voices for the dialogue between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, and the enchanting Vater Abraham (SWV 477) with its sinfonias for pairs of violins with the rich man (B) and recorders with Abraham (T) probably dating from the 1620s and new to me.

The greater variety of styles shown in CD2 makes this pair of CDs as good an introduction to Schütz as one could imagine. This is not the sweep up of oddments that the final volume of a series often is. If you do not know the long-lived Schütz to be the major figure in German music in the 17th century, buy this volume and start from here.

David Stancliffe