Tag: Renaissance

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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Lute Duos around 1500
Karl-Ernst Schröder, Crawford Young
58:27
Glossa GCD 922513 (© 2002)
Music by Agricola, Ambrogio, Busnois, Dalza, Desprez, van Ghizeghem, Isaac, Lapicida, de Orto, Spinacino & anonymus

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he end of the fifteenth century coincided with the end of a well-established tradition of lute-playing. Lutenists abandoned their quills, and plucked strings with their fingers instead, which made it possible to sustain a polyphonic piece on one lute. Lute tablatures evolved to help players cope with this new way of playing. In 1582 Johannes Tinctoris describes how lutenists played duets together: a tenorista would play the lowest voices of a composition, while his companion would improvise complex, virtuosic divisions, noodling around the highest voice or beyond. Unfortunately, by its very nature, improvised music tends not to get written down, yet there are some early 16th-century sources which nevertheless give us a fair idea of what these lute duets may have sounded like.

Karl-Ernst Schröder and Crawford Young play a total of 31 pieces from 13 different sources. Many of them are arrangements of well-known standards – Fortuna desperata, T’Andernaken, Josquin’s Adieu mes amours, and Ghiselin’s Juli amours. They play six duets arranged by Spinacino from the first two books of printed music for the lute (1507), and four from the Segovia Manuscript (Archivo Capitular de la Catedral), including Roellrin’s wonderful setting of Hayne van Ghizeghem’s De tous biens plaine, where the divisions scurry over the full range of the instrument. The extraordinary rhythmic complexity of Scaramella (track 17) contrasts with the surprising, non-extrovert walking bass of Tandernaken (track 18). In another setting of Tandernaken (track 20), the divisions bustle in the bass, while the other lute plays the two highest voices without decoration.

Their lutes are on the small side – two in A (a well-matched pair – both are by Richard Earle of Basel) and one in E (by Joel van Lennep of Rindge, USA). The high pitch enhances the delicate, ethereal nature of the music. Their playing is unfussy, and expressive without the blight of self-indulgent rubato. The overall sound is well balanced, their ensemble spot on, and their lightness of touch for non-obtrusive rapid-fire divisions is a delight.

The present CD is a re-issue of a recording made in 2001, and is dedicated to Schröder who died in 2003.

Stewart McCoy

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Stephen Farr
68:35
Resonus RES10143

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he music on this disc was recorded on the new Taylor & Boody organ (opus 66) at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. The Gentlemen of the College Choir, conducted by David Skinner, provide plainsong in those pieces where its inclusion is appropriate. The instrument in question is comprehensively described by George Taylor in the accompanying booklet. Stephen Farr’s playing makes the best possible case for a selection of pieces that, if they are not all actual masterworks, are the works of masters.

He begins and ends appropriately with Byrd: first A voluntarie for my Ladye Nevell BK 61 and concluding with the Fancie BK 46 which is the penultimate piece in My Lady Nevells Booke; the latter contains what seems to be a fairly overt reference to the plainsong Salve Regina in the opening “alto” part. The earliest named composer is Tallis, and the alternate verses of his hymn Ecce tempus idoneum are chanted by the attendant Gentlemen. The neglected and underrated John Blitheman, one of Bull’s teachers, is represented by two of his settings of Gloria tibi trinitas (a.k.a. In nomine I and IV), while Bull himself provides the second of his several substantial In nomines plus the slighter Coranto joyeuse.

Indisputably the most monumental work from the Tudor and Jacobean repertory is Tomkins’ massive Offertory, timed here at 17’30”. (Bernhard Klapprott hurtles through it in a mere 16’29” during his recording of Tomkins’ complete keyboard music on MDG 607 0706-2 from 1997.) This wonderful and passionate peroration was quite recently found to have been based upon the theme to which Byrd set the words “Let me never be confounded” in the Te Deum from his Great Service, information that does not appear in Magnus Williamson’s fine notes. This is excusable because no mention is made of Stephen Jones’ discovery (published in 1993) at the appropriate point in the third revised edition of Tomkins’ complete keyboard music (Musica Britannica V, 2010), despite the fact that the editor had written an article in 1999, based around this very discovery. Stephen Farr compensates with a riveting interpretation of this masterwork. The youngest of the named composers is Orlando Gibbons, and he contributes one of his many fine fantasias, GK 9.

It remains to mention the two anonymous pieces selected by Stephen Farr. One is a Magnificat in which the Gentlemen sing alternate verses (Early English Church Music VI, no 4). This ascetic piece is the second longest on the disc, but such is the creativity (vivacious rhythms, striking themes, varied textures) of the composer (possibly Thomas Preston), and the responsiveness of the organist, that the time passes disappointingly quickly. Preston is also a candidate as composer of the other anonymous work, Bina caelestis II. This track was the catalyst for my deciding to purchase the disc. In the first edition of his early short study of Byrd written to coincide with his tercentenary in 1923, E.H. Fellowes attributed this and several other such pieces in British Library MS Add. 29996 (not as given in the notes) to Byrd, only to have to return them to anonymity in his major book on Byrd published in 1936. Beginning with what Tomkins noted as “a good 2 parts”, the piece develops melodically and harmonically, the gifted composer increasing the texture to three parts and finally four in a climax that sounds, in context, little short of a form of ecstasy. As someone with a low tolerance of plainsong, I found that the contribution of the College Gentlemen enhanced the overall structure of the piece – worthy of Byrd, even though not by him.

This is an outstanding recording that surpasses most of those based on this repertory and which have appeared on more prominent labels. The presentation is of a piece with the consistent excellence of the music and of Stephen Farr’s playing: by eschewing interpretational gestures he allows the music to speak through him all the more powerfully. The information about the organ and the music (the lacuna about Tomkins’ Offertory not being the fault of the author) is complemented by fine colour photographs. In all, this is the best disc of music from this rich repertory that I have encountered in a long time.

Richard Turbet

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The Queen’s Six
63:56
Resonus RES10146

This is an outstanding recording which merits many sales and wide distribution. While most of the pieces are, in context, relatively familiar fare, one would expect usually to hear them sung by an ensemble containing a top line of trebles (such as a cathedral choir) or sopranos (such as a chamber choir). Such is the expertise of these six male singers – two countertenors, two tenors, a baritone and a bass – that there is no sense of strain at either extremity, and the overall sound is perfectly balanced, grainy enough to render individual parts audible, but smooth enough for a good blend (with apologies for beginning to resemble an advertisement for coffee, or indeed whiskey – not the worst of analogies, perhaps). As to the musical content, two composers come out of this recording particularly well. Of the three pieces by Byrd, Attend mine humble prayer is one of two premieres on this disc – the last of his seven penitential psalms which begin his Songs of sundrie natures of 1589. Only two more of these small gems have ever been recorded, so it would be excellent if The Queen’s Six were able to incorporate the rest into future programmes; with “compleat” recordings of several sections of his output in recent years, there are ever fewer premieres on disc of pieces by Byrd, but many of his songs still remain to be commercially recorded, as do some of his Anglican works. Morley also features well, also with three recordings including a premiere, though this is somewhat “left field”: Haec dies is in fact a clever adaptation of an untexted “Aria” a3 from his A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke of 1597, where it appears on page 68. (Frustratingly this information is not supplied by Peter Phillips in his otherwise adequate notes.) Morley also benefits from the presence of the sublime Laboravi in gemitu meo, his apparent steal from Philippe Rogier, though whether Morley was really passing it off as his own is not proven. Like Morley, Tomkins was a pupil of Byrd, and he too has three works here, including the wonderful sacred song Turn unto the Lord. Amongst a consistently fine set of interpretations, the Six’s version of his profound Almighty God the fountain of all wisdom is particularly intense, as is their rendering of his setting of When David heard, and the setting by Weelkes is also included, beside his less familiar O Jonathan and O how amiable. Two well-known pieces each by Gibbons and Tallis, including the latter’s substantial Videte miraculum, complete a rewarding programme.

Richard Turbet

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Jean-Luc Ho organ/harpsichord
70:00
encelade ECL1401
Clarifica me Pater (III), Fantasias in D, G & A, Parson’s In Nomine, The Maiden’s Song, My Lady Nevell’s Ground, Pavan in A, Sir William Petre Pavan & Galliard, The Queen’s Alman, Susannah Fair, Ut re mi fa sol la & Walsingham

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n this disc the French musician Jean-Luc Ho plays fifteen pieces by Byrd on two modern instruments which are “after” models from the sixteenth century. The organ, by Aurelien Delarge and Guillaume Rebinguet-Sudre (2012), is based on an instrument in Alkmaar which was the work of Hans von Coblentz (1511), while the harpsichord, by Ryo Yoshida (2010), is based on an original by the Venetian maker Alessandro Trasuntino of 1531 which is now at the Royal College of Music in London.

The list of the recording’s contents throws up two intriguing items. In 1999 Hyperion released Davitt Moroney’s recording of Byrd’s Complete keyboard music (CDA66551/7). However, Byrd’s contemporaries arranged several of his vocal or consort works for keyboard (published in Musica Britanica 55 or 66). Given the nature of Moroney’s project, he rightly excluded them from his boxed set, apart from O quam gloriosum because he agreed with Oliver Neighbour that it is the work of Byrd himself. Of the many recordings of Byrd’s keyboard music which have continued to be released since Moroney’s magnum opus, Aapo Hakkinen’s excellent William Byrd (1540-1623): music for the virginals has included the premiere of one such arrangement, the Lullaby (Alba ABCD 148, released in 2000). Now two more of these arrangements, both premieres, have been included on the record under review, establishing it as an important contribution to Byrd discography. The arrangements in question are of Susanna fair from Byrd’s Psalmes, sonets and songs of 1588; and of the Fantasia in four parts from the Psalmes, songs, and sonnets of 1611.

When it comes to the music itself, although the selection of material is interesting and varied, it does not hang together as a coherent programme. The opening track illustrates the problem of the disc in microcosm. The maiden’s song is an episodic piece that does not seem to be a natural overture. M. Ho plays it on the organ, and the occasional density of the passage work and chords in the left hand suggests that the piece is better suited to a harpsichord. He begins it stridently, and changes registration for each of the eight variations, but these new registrations do not assist the continuity of Byrd’s rhetorical flow, with the result that the interpretation of the piece overall seems choppy and a bit disjointed, and the impression of the programme as a whole reflects these qualities. The problem is not so much in the selection of pieces, though more pavans and galliards would not have gone amiss; nor in the sequence, though there is a central block of variational pieces followed by another block of discursive pieces, and these pieces in the two central blocks could have been shuffled to greater effect. It is in the interpretation of individual pieces where the problem inherent in this recording seems to abide.

The playing of the individual pieces is competent enough, but does not manage to be engaging. Walsingham itself, the title track, could be interpreted as expressing internal turmoil, wherein Byrd exploits differences of tempo, texture and figuration in a virtuoso manner: for instance, in one pair of variations 15 and 16, the first of the pair begins in duple time, then changes to triple time halfway through; then the following variation begins with triple time in the right hand and simultaneous duple time in the left. Also, the final three variations 20-22 form one of the most emotional climaxes that Byrd ever wrote for the keyboard. Capably though M. Ho plays the piece, the tensions within the piece are never exploited in his interpretation, which is not bland, but is hardly gripping either. Similarly, M. Ho’s Ut re mi fa sol la makes far less impact than Moroney’s penetrating recording in an ungrateful acoustic. Shorter pieces such as Byrd’s own arrangement of Parson’s In nomine and the far more familiar Queen’s alman seem shouty, while the Fantasia in A, Byrd’s first masterpiece for keyboard and a musical wonderland of opposites magically contrived to dwell in harmony one with another, is also a missed opportunity. The rest of the pieces are all well enough chosen and capably played, but none of the performances catch fire or shine a light on adjacent pieces, so the overall impression is of worthiness rather than inspiration. On a positive note, it was a good decision to commission the notes on the music from Dennis Collins: they are concise and excellent.

Finally, I have issues with all three (sic) transcriptions of pieces by Byrd included on this disc. There is only one source for Susanna fair yet in the repeated passage that concludes the work, M. Ho flattens the E in the “alto” part to create a C minor chord, which contradicts the unique source and also the sharpened Fs at the same point in Byrd’s original versions, which are set a tone higher, for five-part choir and for voice and viols. This seems contrary and unnecessary. Similarly in bar 21 of the Fantasia he flattens the second E (a minim) in the “treble” part, contrary to the lone original source of the keyboard transcription and the printed version for consort, which leave the note naturalized like the first E (a crotchet). This is regrettable since in the opinion of Oliver Neighbour (supported by Alan Brown) the transcription for keyboard, undoubtedly by Byrd’s pupil Thomas Tomkins, is of an early version, c. 1590, of the Fantasia subsequently published with a few slight differences (though not in this instance) in 1611, as noted above. The disc concludes with a modern transcription, presumably by M. Ho himself, of Byrd’s Memento salutis auctor in three parts from his first book of Gradualia, 1605. Why? It is certainly a most agreeable piece, and seems to be relatively popular on Continental Europe because the first commercial recording, even before The Cardinall’s Musick’s Byrd Edition, was by a Spanish choir; but it was neither composed for keyboard by Byrd nor arranged by one of his contemporaries, and with a repertory of a hundred pieces for keyboard by Byrd from which to choose, plus half a dozen contemporary keyboard arrangements of his vocal or consort music still awaiting a commercial recording, one of these, especially from among the latter, would have been preferable to a work with no provenance for keyboard.

Richard Turbet

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The Brabant Ensemble, Stephen Rice
76:33
Hyperion Records CDA68088
Ave Maria a3, Domine non secundum peccata nostra, In illo tempore… Non turbetur, O pulcherima inter mulieres, O vos omnes, Surge Petre

Alastair Harper

Beauty Farm (Bart Uvyn countertenor, Achim Schulz, Adriaan de Koster & Hannes Wagner tenor, Joachim Höchbauer & Martin Vögerl bass
117:09 (2 CDs)
frabernardo FB 1504211
Motets a4 Domine non secundum peccata, O Domina mundi, Sancta Maria mater Dei, Salve regina, Si ignoras te
Motets a5 Ave mater matris Dei, Emendemus in melius, O beata Maria, O flos campi, Sancta et immaculata, Tribulatio cordis mei, Veni dilecta mea
Motets a6 Ave salus mundi, Benedicta es, Descendi in hortum meum, O crux splendidior, O Jesu Christe succurre miseris, Peccata mea sicut saguttæ, Si bona suscepimus

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he quirkily named Beauty Farm draws its membership from a number of top continental ensembles and sounds beautifully blended with accurate intonation. If the recorded sound gave an initial impression of claustrophobia, by no means inappropriate for Gombert, I soon warmed to it. What seemed lacking was a wide dynamic range, with long sections delivered at an amiable mezzo forte and little attempt at anything atmospherically quiet or dramatically loud. The performances seem to rely on Gombert’s often remarkable harmonic progressions, but sometimes these were just not enough to hold the attention, and I could certainly have done with more expressive singing.

The two discs offer a generous cross-section of Gombert’s motets in four, five and six parts, and if the performances were a bit unrelenting in large helpings, this may well be a collection best dipped into rather than consumed in its entirety. The notes make extravagant claims for the new editions being performed – ‘the new editions… reveal a dark, intricate, rough and vibrant music.’ This seems to be attributed to the new application of musica ficta. As a performer grown increasingly suspicious of the overenthusiastic application of these chromatic inflections, I would be wary of any suggestion that they reveal anything hidden about a composer’s original intentions – the lack any specific examples in the notes leaves the question open.

D. James Ross

Nicolas Gombert (c1495-1560) “was probably the most important composer of the generation of musicians between Josquin and Palestrina along with… Morales and Clemens.” His dense and complex polyphony is uncompromising in its demands, on both performers and listener alike, but richly repays the effort!

Beauty Farm (why the name??) and especially their editor, Jorge Martin, are to be congratulated on assembling this fine collection of some of Gombert’s greatest motets. Particular highlights for me were the opening track of disc 1, Veni Dilecta Mea, with its cantus firmus obstinatus ‘Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis’, the magnificent Peccata Mea on the same disc, with its wonderful cadential ‘Miserere mei’ closing both prima and seconda pars, and the remarkable polytextual Salve Regina on disc 2, with each voice having a different Marian text, all finally coinciding (to satisfying effect) on the closing ‘O Dulcis Maria.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAT1VnwlTyA

Performances are one-to-a-part, in the mellow acoustic of Kartause Mauerbach. Musica Ficta is convincingly and copiously applied, resulting in some absolutely astonishing harmonic clashes. Tone and blend are excellent, although words are often rather indistinct, and there is a certain sameness in the music-making; these wondrous pieces are, however, best listened to and enjoyed in small doses, so the latter need not concern one unduly. Jorge Martin’s sleeve notes are good, though one would have liked a little more detailed description of the individual motets.

Alastair Harper

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