Tag: Renaissance

Stimmwerck
62:10
cpo 777 937-2

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n many ways there is no more exposed singing scenario than one-to-a-part fifteenth century vocal music. It demands a perfect blend and perfect intonation, and that on vocal lines which sometimes seem to defy melodic logic. This CD presents an intriguing selection of 15th-century motets and songs which places the big names – Dufay, Pullois and Brassart – alongside lesser figures such as de Sarto, Martini and Krafft as well as airing several anonymous works from the period. Unfortunately the standard of the singing is variable, often very fine and nicely blended, but just occasionally settling badly on to chords. It would be invidious to highlight particular voices, but bringing guest voices into an established ensemble is always a hazardous business. There is a pleasant come-and-go to the dynamics and a nice sweep to the melodic lines, and articulation is generally effective although just occasionally detail is lost. This CD is well worth the investment for the wealth of relatively unknown material it contains, brought to light as part of a project exploring musical life in Austria in the late middle ages.

D. James Ross

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“Tradizione scritta e tradizione orale”
Aquila Altera Ensemble
59:18
Tactus TC 300004

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is hard to pin down what case this CD is trying to make. The repertoire seems consist of works from written manuscript sources and, if the players are applying a huge degree of improvisation, this is not really apparent. In the case of the very familiar anonymous 15th-century Saltarello which appears as track 2 on the CD – it was used most notably as dance music in Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet – it is hard to see what element of the oral culture has been applied to the printed source. The melody is repeated several times with different instrumental textures, but surely this is simply standard modern performance practice for this repertoire?

In some of the other pieces it is possible that there is a greater degree of improvisation, but not enough to establish the CD’s credentials as a discussion document on the subject. The performances are lively and generally engaging, but a rather thin and hissy recorded sound spoils the ambience and I was surprised to note that the recording was only two years old. Some of the of the more intensely-toned tracks such as those for soprano and recorders actually distort rather badly. Amongst the redeeming features is some terrific zampogna playing from Marco Cignitti and some very energetic dance numbers, but perhaps this programme needs to be streamlined and then brought into a studio for a higher-quality recording.

D. James Ross

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Music and Art from the Time of Caravaggio and Gentileschi
El Mundo, Richard Savino
76:26
Sono Luminus DSL-92195

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or those, like me, less well versed in the sphere of Renaissance Italian art, the Artemisia of the title is Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, upon whose life the current CD is based. The release of the CD coincides happily with the release of Alexandra Lapierre’s historical novel Artemisia, although Savino clearly had cold feet about marketing the CD purely under the name of Artemisia and has rather spuriously bolted on the much more familiar name of Caravaggio. Artemisia’s travels bring her to Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and London, and Savino has assembled vocal and instrumental music from these five great cultural centres of the Renaissance.

This assemblage of music cleverly includes unfamiliar names such as Gagliano, Mazzocchi, Corbetta, Falconieri and Giramo among the more familiar Monteverdi, Caccini, Rossi and Lanier. The performances by the singers and instrumentalists of El Mundo are lively and heavily characterized, although I felt the group’s female voices occasionally sacrificed intonation in the interests of drama, which would become wearing on repeated listening, but when singing in ensemble this was less intrusive. On the positive side there is some lovely and unobtrusive vocal ornamaentation. The enormous continuo department includes Baroque guitars, harps, archlute, theorbos, harpsichord and organ, and as a result there is an engaging variety of instrumental colours on display. This is an enjoyable CD with a pleasing variety of music artfully performed, and from the paintings reproduced in the booklet Artemisia Gentileschi deserves more attention as a member of the small group of genuinely talented woman painters working in what was essentially a man’s world.

D. James Ross

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The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
62:07
+ Dum transisset Sabbatum I & II
Gimell CDGIM 046

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s Peter Phillips readily points out in his programme notes, this is a setting of the mass in which the spotlight is seldom off the virtuosic top line of the choir, and his three superb trebles, Janet Coxwell, Amy Haworth and Emma Walshe are the principal virtue of this new recording. Sounding truly at home in the stratospheric heights in a way which I have not heard female trebles manage in previous recordings, they invest Taverner’s highly idiosyncratic lines with musicality and a radiant power. Cashing in on the complete security of the top line, Peter Philips takes the Mass setting at a more dignified pace than some previous recordings, allowing the true magnificence of Taverner’s polyphony to shine through. The result is probably the most impressive and thoroughly satisfying account of the Mass so far on record, and for those unfamiliar with the sound of high trebles, a truly thrilling experience. The detailed programme note provides a context for the work, although it never mentions the elephant in the room – why the trebles are singing at this stratospheric height in the first place. With the current debate on performance pitch generating more heat than light he is perhaps wise simply to stick to the group’s traditional adherence to the Wulstan doctrine of upward transposition, although listeners deserve to be told that large numbers of musicologists now dismiss the practice entirely, and revelatory performances of this very work at ‘written’ pitch make a powerful case against Wulstan’s theory. So perhaps Taverner never intended his music to sound quite like this, but like the stratospheric and equally fictional Allegri Miserere the results are undeniably thrilling. The CD is rounded off by lush performances of Taverner’s two settings of Dum transisset Sabbatum, a suitably calming episode after the thrills of the Mass.

D. James Ross

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Vocalconsort Berlin, Daniel Reuss
49:06
Accent ACC 24307
+ Angelus ad pastores ait, Ave Maria, Dixit Dominus, Magnificat super aurora lucis rutilat, Quem vidistis pastores & Videntes stellam

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]assus’ extraordinary settings of the thirteen Prophetiæ Sibyllarum belong to the same unsettled and unsettling harmonic sound-world as his tortured Tears of St Peter and a handful of his more troubled madrigals, all the close cousins of the music of Gesualdo. No harmonic progression seems to go in the anticipated direction, and occasionally chords spring from roots which neither prepare for nor build towards them. The results are constantly startling and occasionally disorientating, and constantly challenging to sing. The Vocalconsort of Berlin present performances of such assurance and complete security that it is salutary to recall just how hard this mercurial music is to sing. A perfect balance, utterly secure intonation and a constant inexorable sense of direction make this one of the most impressive recordings I have heard of this repertoire. The Prophetiæ Sibyllarum only make up half a programme, and the Consort add on a group of Christmas motets and the sonorous ten-part Magnificat super aurora lucis rutilat. Even with these bonus tracks the recording lasts for under 50 minutes, and some listeners may regard it as poor value, but bearing in mind the harmonic and intellectual density of the Prophetiæ I certainly didn’t feel short-changed. Anyone unfamiliar with the Prophetiae has a delight in store, and those already acquainted with some of Lassus’ most outlandish compositions will love the consummate professionality of these performances.

D. James Ross

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Laudantes Consort, Guy Janssens
54:09
sonamusica SONA1504
+Agimus tibi gratias, Infelix ego & Parce mihi Domine

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he urbanely elegant polyphony of Cipriano de Rore can sound a little impersonal, but the Mass Doulce Mémoire (based on the melancholy song of that name by de Roré’s French contemporary Pierre Sendrin) shows the suave international master also capable of emotion and passion. A composer whose portraits show an ascetic, gaunt of face and sunken of cheek, and who famously – and perhaps uniquely – failed to be charmed by Venice, is something of an enigma, and his music sometimes seems equally mysterious. The Laudantes Consort under their director Guy Janssens explores this enigma in the Mass Doulce Mémoire and three of de Rore’s most expressive and powerful motets, and generally sympathetic singing and direction provides insights into this intriguing music. If the strong top line masks occasional infelicities in the alto part, resulting perhaps from the mixed sex alto line-up, the overall sound is rich and tuneful. It is nice to see the name of Erik van Nevel, himself a prominent and perceptive conductor of this sort of repertoire, featuring in the bass section of the choir, and a highly readable and informative programme note by the eminent musicologist Ignace Bossuyt ensures that this is a valuable contribution to the enhancement of de Rore’s reputation.

D. James Ross

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Egidius Zwartet & College
157:20 (2 CDs)
Et’cetera KTC1415
Music by Flamingus, Hellinck, de Manchicourt, Mergot de Novo Portu, de Sermisy & anon

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he final 2CD volume in this exemplary series of recordings of music from the superb Leiden Choirbooks presents on the first CD two complete Mass settings by Lupus Hellinck and Pierre de Manchicourt respectively with motets by Johannes Flamingus and Franciscus Mergot de Novo Portu, while the second, perhaps more intriguingly, presents the Mass ‘Philomena’ by Claudin de Sermisy in a liturgical context, which also employs further polyphonic works by Flamingus and Joachimus de Monte from the sixth Leiden Choirbook. Avoiding the frequently recorded works by the established masters which also feature in the choirbooks, the performers have wisely concentrated on music we are unlikely to have heard before by composers whose names are less than household words. What is truly remarkable is the uniformly high quality of the music. The quality of the singing by the Egidius Quartet and College has improved throughout this protracted project, and they present the current programme with considerable authority. The lavish illustrations and the high quality programme notes to which we have become accustomed throughout the series also grace this final volume, leaving listeners with a suitably rich celebration of these remarkable musical volumes.

D. James Ross

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Clare Wilkinson mS, Rose Consort of Viols
67:20
Delphian DCD34169

This is a marvellous recording. Frustratingly, it’s years since I last looked at so much of this music: some of it has come back, but I haven’t managed to look out the scores. But no matter – just listen. The viols were created in imitation of an altar-piece by Lorenzo Costa (in San Giovanni in Monte, Bologna) from 1497, i. e., before any surviving viol, by Roger Rose and students at West Dean College. The repertoire is international. It is appropriate that MS Bologna Q 18 matches the picture, to the extent that part of that early 16th-century manuscript was copied by the composer and choirmaster Giovanni Spataro in Bologna. The printed pieces in the first decade include a variety of pieces that were of the late 15th century, while the English Henry VIII Book follows early in the 1510s.

There are 24 items here, from a range of sources – personally, I’d have welcomed details of the source for each piece. In fact, I’d love to see John Bryan publish the music for voice and viols – perhaps with further details from David Fallows? Clare Wilkinson is marvellous at singing music that is mostly less elaborate than the accompaniments. Do buy it!

Clifford Bartlett

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The Cardinall’s Music, Andrew Carwood
71:58
Hyperion CDA68095
Ave Dei patris filia, Benedictus, Candidi facti sunt Nazarei, Christ rising again, E’en like the hunted hind, Expend O Lord, Homo quidam fecit coenam, Honor virtus et potestas, Litany, O Lord open thou our lips, Out of the deep, Te Deum, The Lord be with you & Venite

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he latest release in The Cardinall’s Musick’s Tallis Edition on Hyperion, this CD presents a mixture of Latin and vernacular sacred works including music for the Catholic and Anglican liturgies. It was very interesting listening to the Cardinall’s Musick’s more abrasive sound after the gleaming tones of the Tallis Scholars, particularly in light of the fact that the two groups share members. I found myself slightly falling out of love with the insistent soprano sound of Celia Osmond, whose intermittent use of vibrato I found grating, while Amy Haworth (one of Peter Philips’ fine trebles on his new recording of the Taverner Missa Corona Spinea) produced a more consistently pure sound. More worrying however were the slight lapses in intonation in various parts, which suggested under-preparation in several of the works mainly for reduced forces. Elsewhere in the full choir sections, the Cardinall’s Musick’s signature security of blend and pitch was fully in evidence. By necessity perhaps in a complete edition, this CD is a bit of a musical ragbag and I never felt that the singers settled in the way that a group recording the complete works of a composer should. Bearing in mind that the Chapelle du Roi under Alistair Dixon produced a consistently impressive complete edition of Tallis in the early 2000s for Signum, now available at bargain price, we could perhaps hope for something more consistently impressive from The Cardinall’s Musick. And having heard and sung the Psalm tunes for Archbishop Parker in muscular ‘Tudor English’, accounts like these in modern English sound increasingly twee.

D. James Ross

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Blue Heron, Scott Metcalfe
65:51
Robert Jones Missa Spes nostra
Nicholas Ludford Ave cujus conceptio
Robert Hunt Stabat mater
BHCD1005
+Sarum plainchant, Kyrie Deus creator omnium

This is the fourth of five projected discs[note]Vol. 5 will be released in 2016.[/note] in which Blue Heron, Scott Metcalfe’s Boston-based professional choir, records some of the cream of the great assemblage of contemporary Latin settings in the Peterhouse partbooks of c.1540, as edited and completed by Nick Sandon.

Ever since presenting his doctoral thesis on the Peterhouse books in 1983 Sandon has been quietly beavering away, editing – and revising – his completions of the more than fifty defective items they contain, plus editions of ten complete pieces that are unique to this source. Now in sybaritic retirement in rural France, Sandon is currently putting the final touches to his completion of the very last item, the Missa Libera nos by one Thomas Knyght (full of calculated piquant dissonance, he tells me). All are self-published in Sandon’s Antico Edition, which he acquired in the 1980s and initiated with his invaluable editions of the chant and liturgy of the Sarum Mass. Blue Heron’s discs are also self-published, thanks to a host of what I take to be mostly local financial backers that put British Arts philanthropy to shame. And I cannot help wondering why it has been left to a specialist American choir to record this recovered treasury of late-Henrican Latin polyphony while virtually all our home-grown counterparts (and our collegiate and cathedral choirs, for that matter) have remained seemingly unaware of the impeccably restored masses and motets that have been issuing from Antico for decades.[note]An honourable exception is the choir of New College, Oxford, under Edward Higginbottom, which included Ludford’s Ave cujus conceptio and the equally stunning Domine Jesu Christe in a recent-ish recording. A complete Antico Edition catalogue is available online at www.anticoedition.co.uk[/note]

The Peterhouse books (now in the library of Peterhouse College, Cambridge) were copied, probably in 1540 and 1541, by the singer-scribe Thomas Bull, for use by the newly constituted choir of Canterbury Cathedral, following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the Benedictine monastery in 1540 and its almost immediate replacement by the present secular establishment, with its governing body of dean and prebendaries. The music is all in five parts, much of it of the highest quality. Bull probably took at least some items from the repertory of the then pre-eminent choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, whence he had been recruited. At Canterbury, Bull was one of the twelve vicars-choral[note]There was also a number of petty (minor) canons on the foundation, some of whom may well have sung in the polyphonic choir.[/note] (Tallis was another) who sang alongside ten boy choristers, and his immaculately copied partbooks – for use, not for show – filled an urgent need in an institution which Henry was determined to make the most splendid of the English cathedrals.[note]Polyphony had long been cultivated at Canterbury, by at least a monastic choir and probably also a Lady Chapel choir. Boys may even have been involved, but standards can never have been as high nor repertoire so impressive as those envisaged for the new set-up.[/note] Despite Henry’s ecclesiastical reforms, on some of which he back-tracked in his later years, it was not until 1549, two years after his death, that Cranmer introduced the first Book of Common Prayer: and even then many cathedrals were slow to make the changeover from Latin to English. Whether the Peterhouse books were brought back into use under Mary Tudor we don’t know. Their survival, though incomplete, is a prodigious stroke of luck, given that such incalculable quantities of Latin church music were wantonly destroyed during the religious upheavals of the later 16th century.

A second stroke of luck is that Sandon has undertaken the self-imposed task of restoring the missing parts that have till now made so much of this glorious music unperformable. Of the original five partbooks, the tenor book has been lost, and pages are missing from either end of the treble book. This means that in a few cases two parts out of five have had to be editorially supplied: no mean feat, given the kind of semi-free-wheeling idiom that was favoured by English composers of this period. Having followed the recording closely with the Antico editions before me, the nearest I can come to a quibble is that a two-note treble figuration in one solitary cadence does not ring quite true to my ear: all else is the product of creative, musicianly scholarship for which lovers of early church music will long remain in Sandon’s debt.

It is a third stroke of luck that Scott Metcalfe, director of Blue Heron, shares his editor’s high standards. The amply-illustrated booklet that accompanies the disc reads like a novel (as the saying goes) and is a model of its kind. In lucid, non-technical language, Metcalfe writes about the Peterhouse books, the individual works recorded, and such vital matters as contemporary pronunciation (which the choir attempts) and performing pitch. Musical sixth-formers and first-year music students might do worse than access the eventual five booklets as a reliable and up-to-date introduction to English church music of the period, and to the many problems and controversies surrounding its editing and performance.

One of the booklet’s more exotic credits is for Roy Sansom’s in-the-cracks pitch pipe at A448: very nearly a quarter-tone above our modern A440, that is, and exactly a semitone below A473, which an emerging consensus believes to have been the prevailing choir pitch of the period. With the aid of the new pipe, Hunt’s stet-clef Stabat Mater is sung at A448. The Jones Mass and the Ludford antiphon are both notated in high clefs, but transposition down a fourth (even within the A448-centred compass) produced an uncomfortably low tessitura for the singers. Praetorius’s advice in such circumstances is to raise the resulting pitch by a tone, but this produced the opposite problem, so the choir eventually settled on raising it a semitone. One polyphonic item is thus sung a semitone below presumed choir pitch, the other two (and associated chant) a semitone above. Could it be, I wondered, that centring on A448 brings the performances within the natural sounding pitch of the splendidly resonant Massachusetts church of the Holy Redeemer, Chestnut Hill, in which the recording was made? Probably not, since – with admirable candour – Metcalfe admits that working for this recording at a pitch slightly above A440, though it ‘seemed a useful experiment at the time…cost us considerable effort’, and may not in the event have ‘made any real difference’. Future recordings will revert to an A440 centrepoint.

All this may come across as hair-splitting fanaticism, but arriving at a pitch-level that (like Goldilock’s porridge) feels just right can be vital in repertory with such a wide compass, and Metcalfe’s meticulous juggling with theory and practicality contrasts markedly with the attitude of too many specialist early choirs. Over here, The Sixteen has in recent years quietly abandoned the damaging 1960s fashion for transposition up a minor third,[note]Lutenists went through a comparable process in the ’70s. One of our leading players, much criticised by the cognoscenti for using nails when most of his rivals had changed to flesh, made the changeover without broadcasting the fact, and it was six months before anyone noticed.[/note] but their major rival sticks determinedly to its Wulstonian guns. Some other choirs seem to settle on pitch-levels at random. I have had horrendous recent experiences of wildly – and audibly – misjudged pitches in what purported to be master classes for amateur singers.

And so, at last, to the music and the performances. Ludford’s Marian votive antiphon Ave cujus conceptio is pure joy and a major discovery. I would fully endorse Sandon’s claim in the Introduction to the Antico edition that Ludford, who ‘on the evidence of his better-known earlier music [in the Lambeth and Caius choirbooks] is commonly regarded as a worthy but minor master’ is shown by his Peterhouse works to be ‘a highly individual, imaginative, resourceful and polished composer, fit to be ranked alongside Taverner’ – high praise! The choir does Ludford ample justice, dipping and soaring effortlessly in his long-drawn phrases while pointing up the pervasive but never rigid imitation that binds the textures together and prefigures the procedures of such as Tallis and Byrd.

If Robert Jones’s Mass is deliberately less showy, it is an impressively-crafted work of great harmonic assurance that repays repeated listening. The four movements are of similar length, thanks to a radically truncated Credo text (everything from ‘et in Spiritum Sanctum’ to the end is omitted) and a lengthy, tripartite Agnus. (Was Jones thinking in the ‘symphonic’ structural terms that David Fallows sees as a feature of many sixteenth-century masses?[note]David Fallows, The Last Agnus Dei: or: The Cyclic Mass, 1450– 1600, as forme fixe in A Ammendola, D Glowotz, J Heidrig (eds.), Polyphone Messen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Funktion, Kontext, Symbol (V & R unipress – 2012)[/note] Or was there extended ritual activity to be covered? The setting is based on a matins chant for Trinity Sunday, a major feast on which there might well have been a general communion and lengthy washing-up to be accommodated at a solemn mass in the royal household chapel for which Jones was almost certainly writing.) The Kyries of English festal masses of the time were always sung to plainchant (as were all Requiems) and the appropriate Sarum troped Kyrie is interpolated here to telling effect, with a commendably un-Solesmes-like vigour and an uncompromisingly rhythmic interpretation – though for some reason the latter aspect is not referred to in Metcalfe’s otherwise comprehensive notes.

Robert Hunt’s is the only setting of the Stabat Mater in the Peterhouse books, as against five in the Eton Choir Book of forty years earlier: perhaps a sign of a shift in the taste of composers towards more refined and ‘literary’ texts. Hunt is an otherwise unknown composer, possibly to be identified with a Magdalen chorister in the years around 1490 and/or with a Chichester chantry priest named in 1535. Sandon has had to restore both the treble and tenor parts of this work, which he sees as mirroring the pared-down exuberance of Fayrfax: like Jones’s Mass, it is a step on the way towards a style – akin to the more ascetic type of late-Perpendicular architecture – that might have become one of the norms in post-Trent England had the Edwardian Reformation not intervened. Here again both the singing and the crystal-clear recording do justice to a hugely enjoyable work, not least at the dramatic cries of ‘Crucifige!’ and in the extended, heart-stirring Amen.

Only two things in Metcalfe’s performances bother me a little. The slowings-down at the ends of sections (especially in the Mass) are not excessive in themselves but can sometimes seem so because of the slightly-too-long gaps that follow: a miscalculation of the editing process, perhaps? And, so far as I can make out, the reduced-voice sections are typically sung not by soloists but by pairs of remarkably well-matched voices: though that is certainly preferable to both a weedy, single-voiced rendition and to the full-choir-throughout policy that was such a negative feature of the pioneering Sheppard recordings of the Clerkes of Oxenford. The contrast of sheer weight between solo and full sections is, surely, a calculated structural element in this repertory, and I miss it most in Jones’s Agnus, the second of which is entirely for the four upper voices. On the other hand, there is no red notation to differentiate reduced-voice from full-choir sections in the Peterhouse books (as there is in the Eton Choir Book) and Blue Heron models itself not on the ten choristers and twelve (-plus?) singing men of Canterbury Cathedral but on the more modest numbers of the household chapel of the Earl of Northumberland, so I suppose it could be argued that in such circumstances no solo/full distinction may have obtained – or, perhaps, have been deemed desirable.

But such worries pale to insignificance in the face of the ongoing achievement of the projected five Peterhouse volumes by this skilled and sensitive choir, the latest contribution to which I most heartily recommend. Follow-up volumes remain highly desirable pie-in-the-sky unless and until further funding can be raised from their generous patrons, but meanwhile the choir is about to embark on the long-term project of recording the complete works of Ockeghem – something to look forward to.

Hugh Keyte

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