Tag: Choral music

The Chapel Choir of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Orpheus Brittanicus, Newe Vialles, directed by Andrew Arthur
70:17
Resonus RES 10238

It is often the context of the music-making that distinguishes its character, and the near ideal conditions of a choir of young singers (helped by performing in the excellent acoustic of Jesus College) together with a quintet of singers who share that background and the strings, lute and keyboard of Orpheus Britannicus, joined by the Newe Vialles viol consort in the subdued Part 6 (Ad Cor) provide a very coherent group of musicians for this tense, yet restrained masterpiece of early German Baroque oratorio.

I admire the overall sound – there are no prima donnas here, nor the sense that this is just another routine performance. The intensity of it all is maintained by the experienced and capable direction of Andrew Arthur, as is the sense of the different chori – well laid out in the structure of the work as it is in the performance. His scholarly and helpful essay is a key element in the liner notes, revealing where and how Anders von Düben transcribed this work from its tablature original of 1680 into staff notation. This is complemented by a revealing note on the Latin text by Francis Basso, which is then given with an English translation. Details of pitch, instruments and tuning complete a model booklet.

The major decision for anyone directing Membra Jesu nostri is whether to use single voices throughout or to use a choir as well as a group of solo singers. Using a choir of bright, young voices and placing the instruments and single voices in the foreground gives a good balance and a clean distinction between the two vocal groups. The choir sings with conviction and clarity, no individual voices stand out to spoil the cohesion and they reflect their director’s precision and their regular experience of singing in the small Chapel at Trinity Hall. This is ideal.

The singers charged with solo lines sing well with each other in the duet and trio sections while retaining their own individuality. Nicholas Mulroy’s distinctive voice never has to over-sing, and Daniel Collins is a good match for him in tone and intensity. His leading of the almost Purcellian moments with their tightly wrought suspensions like the trio sections towards the end of Ad Manus (which were given to the solo singers, unlike the SSA passage at the opening of the final tutti section: I love it, but why?) gave these moments a richness that made me wonder about using the choir at all: the ATB sound is so rich! It was perfect in sit tamen gustatis in Ad pedes, the first number where the choir is tacet. To hear Reuben Thomas on his own you have to wait for Ave verum templum Dei where he sings with the strings – the effortlessness of his bottom notes is miraculous.

Eloise Irving, the first soprano, sings beautifully, with a clarity and grace to which Charlotte Ives responds with a warmer tone; in the duet and trio sections, the contrasting tone colour (unlike the identical tone of S1 and S2 in the choir) offers a genuine contrast, and helps colour the words, which all five solo singers enunciate with exemplary clarity. The choir might have copied this – especially in the homophonic quasi-parlando sections – to advantage. The obvious benefit of a many-voices choir is demonstrated in the long, seamless, fluid lines of the final Amen.

The strings are perfect: I have never heard the Sonata in tremulo in Ad Genua so beautifully detailed by the violins, and the reedy quality of the bass violin is a perfect complement in this music. Their wonderful relaxed cross rhythms in the opening to Ad Latus are a model for how to play this brief sonata.

The viols in Ad Cor made a dark contrast, introducing the SSB vocal complement for this number with its rich chromatic suspensions and a piano end like BWV 106. Their reedy tone is not dissimilar to the sudden change to a regal and trombones in the underworld in L’Orfeo. There is such wonderful variety of mood and expression in this pioneering work, and we should be glad that it has received such skilled and musical a treatment. If you want a recording to complement a six-voice performance, I recommend this CD wholeheartedly; and in its own right it is a fine advertisement for this director and his college choir.

David Stancliffe

Ludus Modalis, Bruno Boterf
Ramée RAM1702

A recording of the Monteverdi Vespers with minimalist scoring and the six-voice Magnificat is a welcome alternative to the plethora of versions with a Praetorius-inspired monumentality that could only have been realised in very few establishments in the early 17th century. While more minimalist versions – beginning with Andrew Parrott’s landmark recording in 1984 – are now the preferred way of hearing performances of the large-scale version that includes the opening toccata, the sonata and the seven-part Magnificat, Ludus Modalis are to be congratulated on providing us with a pared down version, with twelve singers grouped around an organ built by Bernard Boulay after Costanzo Antegnati for the church in Prazac near Angoulême, where this recording was made.

The singers are not random soloists, with little experience of consort or choral singing, but members of the group Ludus Modalis – five sopranos, two altos, three tenors (including Boterf himself) and three basses – formed primarily to sing music of the Renaissance. Their sound is homogeneous, free of modern vibrato and in many ways ideal for the prima prattica. But for some of the singers, the seconda prattica episodes in the psalms as well as in the concerti make demands rather beyond their comfort zone. Like the organ, tuned in a meantone temperament at A=440 with a lot of perfect thirds, the group sing with clarity of sound and clean chording. Their blend with the organ can be heard at its best in Audi Cœlum, where the single notes in the organ bass at cadences can be appreciated.

But there are some question marks in my mind. The first concerns the bassus generalis which Boterf sees as an incipient basso continuo part.  Accordingly he has no qualms in adding to the basic organ two harpsichords (one strung in brass, the other with gut), a bass viol, a bass sackbut and a bass cornett. He uses this array to colour the bass line – and sometimes to reinforce a cantus firmus, as in Nisi Dominus – in a way that seems to me anachronistic and sometimes unmusical: hearing the crochets in the verses with the running bass in Laetatus sum played on a bass sackbut is as odd as using the bass viol with a harpsichord to over-rigidify the fluid bass in Nigra sum. The incongruity is heightened when we hear the ritornelli between the verses of the hymn Ave Maris Stella played on differing combinations of these basso continuo instruments, with the wind and string members taking what are sometimes tenor lines in the ritornelli. Why – since he properly omits the ritornelli in Dixit Dominus – does he choose to retain them in these highly questionable instrumentations in the hymn?

Boterf is aware of the liturgical context of this part of Monteverdi’s 1610 publication and adds antiphons from the Common of the Blessed Virgin Mary, repeating them after each psalm. His solution to the gap left by the un-performable Sonata is ingenious. He uses a Recercar con obligo di cantar la quinta parte senza toccarla by Girolamo Frescobaldi, where he gives the wordless sung fifth part to the sopranos, fitting the words: Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis to it; and he doubles the organ tenor with bass cornett and the bass line with the sackbut.

But his treatment of the opening versicle and response is muddled liturgically. He has the opening Versicle: Deus in adjutorium sung by the cantor (officiant) and answered by all the male voices in plain Gregorian tone for Domine ad adjuvandum, but then breaks into the D chords of Monteverdi’s six part Response at Gloria Patri, only to have the Gregorian resume at Sicut before reverting to Monteverdi’s setting at Et in saecula, creating a liturgically unwarranted break up in the lines, presumably to preserve Monteverdi’s setting of Alleluia.

In the psalm settings, Boterf does not always make a clear distinction between the alternating verse structure – a feature of both Dixit Dominus and Laetatus sum; and not everyone will like his rather wooden approach to the tempi and changes in proportion in Laudate pueri and the Magnificat.

As we reach Lauda Jerusalem we realise that he is transposing Lauda down a tone, but when we come to the Magnificat there is no downward transposition at all. This makes a number of the soprano entries in the Magnificat seem terrifyingly high – those on high A in Fecit potentiam and in Sicut locutus est seemed particularly out of the sopranos’ comfort zone. Another curiosity is the relation between the voice-parts in Suscepit Israel where the sextus part, notated in a G2 clef, is suddenly transposed down an octave, so that the voices sing in sixths rather than thirds. It also brings the sextus part well below the organ part in measures 52 to 52. What is the textual (or musical) justification for this rearrangement? But I did warm to the beating rank on the organ from measures 22 to 38 in Quia respexit as Monteverdi stipulated.

In spite of these caveats, I like the overall feel of this performance, even if the recording in this small church does not quite have either the bloom or the clarity we might hope for. So I hope listeners will gain in understanding, and singers will be encouraged to perform this version, for which you need no more than an organ for accompaniment.

David Stancliffe

Dorothee Mields, Isabel Schicketanz, David Erler, Georg Poplutz, Tobias Mäthger, Feliz Schwandtke SSATTB, Dresdner Kammerchor, Hans-Christoph Rademann
78:42
Carus 83.277

Volume 19 of Carus’s complete recording of Schütz’s music is an absolute cracker! From the cover, I had expected to hear the set of Italian madrigals that resulted after his first visit to Venice; instead, I got 15 German-language pieces ranging from two duets for alto and tenor with continuo, to more lavishly scored pieces like the glorious Ich beschwöre euch for SSSSATB and continuo, or Haus und Güter erbet man von Eltern which contrasts a group of SSB with three trombones and a tenor with three cornetti, and another tenor with TBB chorus! The disc opens with the composer’s contribution to his brother Georg’s wedding in 1619, Siehe, wie fein und lieblich ist’s, which must have pleased everyone concerned; scored for SSATB, violin, cornetto muto and dulcian, it was reworked for inclusion in the third volume of Symphoniae Sacrae of 1650 (with very good reason!) This is the first volume of this series I have reviewed in a long time, and I must say that the standard is incredibly high; Rademann has gathered a group of singers and instrumentalists who make every work stand out. The recording is crisp and bright, like the execution of the music – everything about this disc is excellent!

Brian Clark

The Rose Ensemble
76:17
Rose00012

Let me begin by paraphrasing the final two sentences of the programme note for this charming CD of anonymous sacred music from 17th-century Malta ‘How could the composers of these pieces not be known? How is it possible that these pieces haven’t been performed in hundreds of years?’ It is perhaps unsurprising that the music in Malta’s great religious establishments in Mdina run by the wealthy Knights of St John should be of a superlative standard, clearly influenced by musical developments in Venice, Rome and other Mediterranean centres of excellence, but the question of who composed it and why we should have no hint as to their identity is more puzzling. Surely there must at least be lists somewhere of performers and people who help prominent church posts – or perhaps not. The excellent American Rose Ensemble under the direction of Jordan Sramek provide simply radiant performances of this long-neglected repertoire, with superb vocalists singing equally effectively as soloists and in consort, while ably supported by a small but beautifully effective instrumental ensemble. The rich acoustic of St Mary’s Catholic Church, New Trier, Minnesota is used to perfect effect, giving this multitextured music a lovely glow vividly captured by sound engineer Peter Nothnagel. I cannot praise too much this excellent project, researched and brought to performance by the group’s director, executed to such a high standard by the musicians of the Rose Ensemble and released on their own label. So often with this sort of well-intentioned championing of neglected music, either the standard of the repertoire itself or the quality of the performances can be disappointing – this production is very much the opposite, with superlative performances of richly rewarding music. Let us hope that some time composers’ names can be matched to this extraordinary collection. Somewhat out of place in almost every respect except that it is setting a text in Maltese is a concluding piece by contemporary American composer Timothy C. Takach – it does show the choir’s versatility and is a thoroughly competent piece of writing, and might work well as a concert encore alongside this repertoire, but to my mind doesn’t really add anything to this CD. At just under five minutes of a 76-minute programme, though, we can easily overlook this.

D. James Ross