Categories
Recording

Buxtehude: Membra Jesu nostri

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

Categories
Recording

Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine

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

Categories
Recording

Resonances of Waterloo

Saint Salvator’s Chapel Choir (University of St Andrews), The Wallace Collection), Tim Wilkinson & Anthony George
Sanctiandree SAND0007
71:22

What? You didn’t know that churches were built to mark the end of the Napoleonic Wars? Or that St James, Bermondsey (one of them) still has its original organ restored pretty much to its original state? Or that Sigismund Neukomm (1778-1858) wrote a Requiem to honour the dead of those wars as well as the memory of Louis XVI? Well, in that case, this CD is for you and you’ll enjoy it! The Requiem is for soloists, choir, organ and brass – keyed trumpet, four hand-horns and three trombones – who make relatively brief but oh-so-telling contributions at key moments. The virtuosity of any brass ensemble led by John Wallace can be taken for granted but the student choir are eminently able co-performers: several of them undertake modest but very capably sung solo passages. The Requiem is complemented by three short but action-packed works for brass ensemble. I really do recommend this, not just as something different, but as something interesting and very well performed. A pat on the back for the recording engineers too, who rise commendably to the challenges posed by these forces. The booklet is pretty much a model of how to do it. This deserves to be an unlikely hit!

David Hansell

Categories
Recording

Tallis: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal

The Gentlemen of HM Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, Carl Jackson
68:22
resonus RES10229

The Enigma Theme in Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations remains an enigma because Elgar never divulged what the theme was (if indeed there ever really was one) although he used to taunt his friends about how obvious it is. Innumerable solutions have been put forward, and in the April 2013 number of the Elgar Society Journal Martin Gough proposed that the theme is Tallis’s Canon, aka the Eighth Tune which Tallis provided for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter of 1567. It is interesting that these two composers are associated in this (albeit improbable) way as, above all other composers, they are hailed as possessing a peculiar but indefinable Englishness. Yet both were heavily influenced by their European predecessors: Gombert amongst others upon Tallis, Wagner, Dvorak and others upon Elgar. In this spirit of Englishness, it can be comforting to listen to one of Tallis’s most Continental works, his majestic Missa Puer natus est nobis a7 sung by the Gentlemen of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, an ensemble equivalent to one, with Tallis among them, that would have sung this very piece during the reign of Queen Mary I. But even in such circumstantial decorum there is no certainty that such an appropriate choir would nowadays perform Tallis’s music to a standard that would transcend such comfortable Englishness. In this instance such concerns can be discarded. The Gentlemen of Hampton Court give excellent performances of every piece on this disc. Another concern might be about how clearly adult male voices in seven parts would project Tallis’s intense music in the Chapel at Hampton Court Palace, the acoustic of which might not be the most resonant. Again there is, in the words of a famous blues song, “no need to worry”. Each line, with two voices to a part, is audible, clear, and well blended with its fellows. Besides the singers themselves – the six regular Gentlemen and the full complement of eight supernumaries – credit must go to Carl Jackson for his judicious tempi, occasioned by his extensive familiarity with every aspect of the recording location.

What of the music itself? Even without the Credo, most of which has been lost, the Missa Puer natus est nobis for seven voices is Tallis’s grandest work, apart from the small matter of Spem in alium in forty. The booklet’s notes by Christian Goursaud, one of the six Gentlemen, competently sets out the competing ideas concerning the circumstances of the work’s composition. It is not only, as he so rightly says, majestic, but it is also seminal, providing in the second Agnus a prominent theme for Byrd’s second consort In nomine a4 besides, at “[Patris] miserere nobis“ in the Gloria, pre-echoes of passages such  as “everlasting“ in Tomkins’ Turn unto the Lord and “auxiliare nos“ as late as Blow’s Salvator mundi; both composers knew Tallis’s music and, while this is not necessarily to say that they deliberately or consciously borrowed this passage or aspects of it, nevertheless it is interesting that Tallis’s plangency was being replicated over a century later. No less musically rewarding is the differently plangent Mass for Four Voices, and it is of further interest because, as Stefan Scot discovered, and has noted in his erudite booklet notes for Priory PRCD 1081 (volume 1 of The Collected Vernacular Works of John Sheppard, sung by The Academia Musica Choir), the Credo is identical, with a few adjustments and details, to the Creed of Sheppard’s First Service.  Stefan will discuss this further in his forthcoming edition of Sheppard’s Anglican music for Early English Church Music.

Exploiting the presence of the supernumaries, the disc begins and ends with motets also in seven parts. Suscipe quaeso starts proceedings in the best possible way, the choir setting out its stall for the rest of the disc with excellent blend and a wonderful fullness of sound, while Loquebantur variis linguis brings it to a jubilant close as Tallis lets his hair down for once. Exquisite performances of the smaller In pace and Miserere nostri separate the two masses.

This disc captures Tallis’s elusive Englishness, being sung by a choir to which he once belonged, in the same way as the recording of his earliest Latin music by The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral (Metronome MET CD 1014), another in which he is known to have sung. All other recordings of Missa Puer natus est nobis have been by adult chamber choirs, such as the self-recommending Stile Antico (Harmonia Mundi HMU807517), but the best of those and the most intriguing version might be the very first, by The Clerkes of Oxenford (Calliope CAL 6623) which, besides seeming to penetrate to the soul of Tallis’s inspiration, also includes what can be retrieved and reconstructed of Tallis’s Credo, which is omitted from all other recordings. The current version of the Missa Puer natus est nobis by the Gentlemen of Hampton Court is unique in being sung by a liturgical choir which has the Mass in its repertory, and it is also superb in every detail: one of the great recordings of music by Tallis.

Richard Turbet

Categories
Sheet music

Zelenka: Six Settings of “Ave regina coelorum” (ZWV 128)

Edited by Frederic Kiernan
Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 204
xvii+2+64pp
ISBN 978-1-9872-0053-9
A-R Editions, Inc. $120.00

This small volume is an excellent guide to how differently a single composer can treat exactly the same text; even the two settings with matching scoring are quite different – while one is in common time, the other is in triple time. Zelenka’s church music is becoming better known through editions and recordings and I hope fans of his music with perhaps more modest forces at their disposal than some of the concerted masses require will explore Kiernan’s editions of these Marian antiphon settings.

That said, the book could have been even shorter, had all the written-out colla parte instruments been left out. Kiernan opts to drop the oboes out in solo passages in the second setting, yet has the very short five-bar trio section in the first doubled by strings. We are told that the viola part for no. 2 is extracted from the bass line, and yet the music in the first bar is not the same (the viola actually doubles the violins). The added basso ripieno part in nos. 2 and 5 (essentially so that the cello does not play along with the solo passages, some of which are in treble clef anyway) could surely just have been marked “[senza basso]”, and the quaver in bar 10 of no. 2 is too prescriptive – the voices above hold the same note for a full crotchet. In fact, that is probably my overriding impression of the edition as a whole – it is great to have the music available in modern notation, but it could have been done in a simpler fashion without detriment.

Brian Clark

Categories
Recording

Schütz: Madrigale & Hochzeitsmusiekn

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

Categories
Recording

Soler: Obra vocal en latín

La Grande Chapelle, Albert Recasens
76:26
Lauda LAU018

This CD came as a real surprise to me. I had been familiar with the fine harpsichord music of the Catalan Padre Soler, which includes some flamboyant Fandangos and other distinctly Iberian dances. I should have guessed that he would also have written church music, but could hardly have anticipated the sort of music recorded here. Squarely-phrased and pre-classical in style, with full orchestral accompaniments including string orchestra, oboes, horns and flutes, and sections for solo voices alternating with episodes for full choir. Once I had got over my surprise, it gradually became apparent that this music was actually rather dull and predictable – somewhere between Vivaldi and early Haydn in style and lacking all the flair and élan of his keyboard music. La Grande Chapelle perform it very expressively, in a generous acoustic and with plenty of drama and musicality, so I’m afraid the shortcomings are all to be laid at the door of Padre Soler. The more I listened to the CD, the more the music sounded like painting by numbers, stock phrases stuck together with other stock phrases – the result is pleasant and blandly harmless but never profound or individual. This is the classic case of a CD which receives four sets of five stars for performance, recorded sound, booklet note and overall presentation but is sadly just dull.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

the ear of theodoor van loon

il primo caravaggisto fiammingo
huelgas ensemble, paul van nevel
66:39
cypres CYP1679
Music by Anerio, de Ghersem, a Kempis, Marenzio, Mazzocchi, Philips, Quagliati, Rimonte, Soriano & Zamponi

This is one of those CD programmes which seek to use a visual artist as a hook for music of the period – this concept has always struck me as rather strange, as the visual, literary and musical arts tend to be at relatively different stages of development at different periods, and in my experience have little to say to one another – think of contemporary artists, writers and composers. Anyway, Theodoor van Loon, a practically unknown Flemish follower of Caravaggio, did at least travel between Brussels and Rome, where he could conceivably have heard all of the music on this CD. And quite honestly I would accept any excuse, however far-fetched, to hear the excellent Huelgas Ensemble singing and playing the music of this period. Among the sacred music which could have charmed the ear of van Loon are works by the two Palestrina students, Francesco Soriano and Felice Anerio, both of whom deserve more attention than they currently get. From the former we get the Agnus Dei from a ‘souped-up’ eight voice version of his master’s Missa Papae Marcelli, while from each we have an equally showy and sonorous motet, all of which obviously shows the influence of Palestrina, but also how music in Rome had moved in the direction of ever-increasing opulence as the 17thh-century progressed. From Gery de Ghersem we have the superb Agnus Dei from his seven-part Mass Ave virgo sanctissima, this productive composer’s only complete surviving work, all the rest having heartbreakingly perished in the Lisbon earthquake and fire of 1755. The CD concludes with sacred music by Giuseppe Zamponi and Peter Philips. As ever, the Huelgas Ensemble provide wonderfully balanced and exquisitely musical accounts of this opulent repertoire, gradually introducing instruments into the choral textures until we reach the beautifully rich and full concluding account of Philips’ Hodie nobis de caelo, where the voices are joined to luminous effect by violins and recorders. In among the largescale sacred music we have more intimate secular vernacular works by Philips, but also by Paolo Quagliati, Luca Marenzio, Domenico Mazzochi, Pedro Rimonte and instrumental music by Nicolaus a Kempis, where various mixtures of solo voices and instruments devised by the ever-imaginative Paul van Nevel provide beautifully animated performances. I think I could listen to the Huelgas Ensemble perform their way through the phone book, but with this CD their unique performance talents are applied to very worthwhile material, much of which, like their painterly inspiration van Loon, is nowadays virtually unknown.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Treasures from Baroque Malta

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

Categories
Recording

Josquin: Miserere mei Deus

Funeral Motets & Deplorations
Cappella Amsterdam, Daniel Reuss
66:10
Harmonia mundi musique HMM 902620

There seems to have been something of a vogue for commemorative music around the end of the 15th-century, music and verse, which would mark the passing of great artists in both media, and it perhaps signals the establishment of composers and poets as individuals of note and status. It became customary for composers to lament the passing of their teachers, and to usefully list in these ‘deplorations’ their fellow students, providing musicologists with useful musical ‘genealogies’ for composers. Opening with Josquin’s exquisite ‘deploration’ for his teacher Johannes Ockeghem, this is a wonderfully comprehensive programme of music by Josquin associated with death including his extended settings of Planxit autem David and the Miserere, concluding fittingly with Musae Jovis by Nicolas Gombert, lamenting his late teacher, Josquin. Cappella Amsterdam produce a wonderfully pure sound and sing this music expressively and convincingly. I had one or two reservations about their pronunciation – surely the Renaissance pronunciation of the French ‘ois’ syllable as ‘way’ is fairly well established, and simply to sing the texts simply as if they were modern French is to lose something. I have to say that an entire programme of sung funeral music does begin to sound a little ‘samey’ – perhaps a piece or two of instrumental music interspersed would have alleviated the similarity of texture. We could perhaps have managed a little more passion in one or two of the pieces, such as the exceptional setting of Absalon fili mi, which – given the passion of the text and Josquin’s extraordinary musical response to it – receives a rather glib performance here. I notice that this is the first of a projected trilogy of deploration music by great composers of the Renaissance, so we await forthcoming albums.

D. James Ross