Tag: Renaissance

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Recording

Monteverdi: Il Terzo Libro de’ Madrigali

Concerto Italiano Monteverdi terzo libro

Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini
64:33
naïve OP 30580

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Monteverdi’s appointment to the court of Mantua in 1590 or 1591 brought to the young composer new opportunities, not the least of which was contact with the Mantuan maestro di cappella Giaches de Wert, one of the great madrigalists of the day, and two of the greatest poets active at of the end of the 16th century: Giovanni Guarini and Torquato Tasso, both occasional visitors to Mantua. Monteverdi’s arrival was also near- coincidental with the recent succession to the duchy of Vincenzo Gonzago, whose expansion of court musical activity included the establishment of a consort of singers modelled on the famous ‘concerto delle dame’ in the rival court at Ferrara.

Put all the above ingredients into the mixer and you arrive at Monteverdi’s third book of madrigals, Il terzo libro de’ madrigali, published in 1592. For Guarini, whose erotic poetry provided the bulk of Monteverdi’s settings in Book 3, and the taste for the sensual combination of high voices established at Ferrara it is necessary to look no further than the delicate tapestry of the first half of the opening madrigal, ‘La giovinetta pianta’, the luminescent texture employed in talking of ‘the tender young plant’ perhaps less potent than in more serious texts but sensuous none the less. All the madrigals in Book 3 are scored for five voices, still of course a cappella at this point in the composer’s development. One of the remarkable features is the manner in which Monteverdi consistently alternates contrasts of colour between high and low voices and texture between polyphony and homophony, nearly always to dramatic purpose. These characteristics are well illustrated in the final madrigal of the collection, the two-part ‘Rimanti in pace’, to a text by Livio Celiano, a pen name for Angelo Grillo. The declamatory poem is part direct speech and part narrative, the composer clearly differentiating the two by giving the parting Tirso’s departing words to his Fillida, ‘Stay and peace be with you’, given to upper voices, while those narrated are darker and more homophonic. The brief cycle comes to a shattering conclusion with the reiteration of Fillida’s unbearably poignant motif, ‘Deh, cara anima mia’ (Tell me, dear heart of mine … who takes you from me?).

Such settings mark a foretaste of the innate dramatic gifts that would eventually lead to Monteverdi becoming the first great opera composer. They are even more in evidence in a pair of three-part cycles in which the text is drawn from episodes in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the first, ‘Vattene pur crudel’ describing the fury and then torment of Armida deserted by Rinaldo, the second the distress of the Christian knight Tancredi after he has killed the Saracen warrior-maiden Clorinda, a topic to which Monteverdi would return memorably in Book 8 almost fifty years later. The former, again a declamatory alternation of direct speech and narrative, the latter vividly descriptive at the point at the end of part 2, where Armida, faint from extreme emotion, lapses into unconsciousness as quiet dissonance takes over before the third part opens with a magical evocation of ‘nothing but empty silence all about her’ greets the reviving Armida.

The madrigal ensemble of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano has gone through several reincarnations since he first started recording Monteverdi’s madrigals. Indeed Alessandro reminds us in a booklet note that it is fifteen years since his last complete madrigal book recording (Book 6). The present ensemble is at least a match for any of its predecessors, with both individuality – the two leading sopranos, Francesca Cassinari and Monica Piccinini, have pleasingly differentiated voices – and an excellent blend that retains enough clarity to allow contrapuntal strands to stand out clearly. Diction and articulation, too, are excellent. Just once or twice I did wonder if Alessandrini was making a little too much of tempo contrasts (‘O primavera’ is an example), but such doubts are rapidly banished within the context of such exceptionally musical performances.

Brian Robins        

Categories
Recording

Josquin: Masses

The Tallis Scholars complete their survey of Josquin's masses

Hercules Dux Ferrarie, D’ung altre amer, Faysant regretz
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
71:40
Gimell CDGIM 051

October 2020!
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This is the final disc in The Tallis Scholars’ complete recording of Josquin des Pres’s masses. Perhaps it is just as well, because this reviewer is running out of superlatives for the music itself and for this choir’s performances of it. Peter Phillips makes substantial claims for these works in his accompanying notes, and it could indeed be said that, so varied is Josquin’s treatment of the Mass text throughout the entire series, many of the eighteen works could almost seem to have been composed by different composers. (Indeed, the Josquin canon has come under intense musicological scrutiny in recent decades, and Missa Da pacem, included in the series, is more likely to have been composed by Bauldeweyn, notwithstanding conflicting attributions to Josquin. This is clearly stated in the recording’s booklet.) This final disc provides some of the knottiest music in the series, and some of the most challenging for the listener. Much of it is music of obsession, with Josquin’s repeated use of one particular motif of four notes in Missa Faysant regretz set beside the egomania of Ercole I d’Este of Ferrera, dedicatee of Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie. To illustrate this one can do no better than to quote Peter Phillips’s note in the accompanying booklet: “To understand how this Mass is constructed it is necessary only to remember that Duke Ercole liked to hear his name sung obviously and often. To this end Josquin took his name and title, HERCULES DUX FERRARIE, and turned their vowels into music by way of the solmisation syllables of the Guidonian hexachord, giving a very neat little melody: … re ut re ut re fa mi re … He then writes these eight notes to be sung 47 times …” The remaining piece Missa D’ung aultre amer is the antithesis of such constructions, being an essay in brevity and simplicity based upon one of Ockeghem’s finest chansons, no doubt as an act of homage by Josquin to the man who might have been his teacher.

A digression. Having seen the British gentleman I am about to mention with his wife at a concert of music by Byrd in the Wigmore Hall, London, a few years ago, I will of course no longer hear a word said against him, but I cannot resist mentioning the resemblance of Ercole, whose portrait is reproduced on the front of the accompanying booklet, to the prominent politician Lord Heseltine. I draw no conclusion other than that they share an ability to appreciate great Renaissance composers.

And as Byrd said of his own music in 1611, “a song that is well and artificially made cannot be well perceived nor understood at the first hearing, but the oftner you shall heare it, the better cause of liking you will discover.” Repeated hearings of the music on this disc keep revealing its felicitous qualities. The obsessive aspects of the music become part of a bigger, broader musical picture as Josquin manipulates them to support the overall construction and rhetoric of his masses. As Peter Phillips notes in his booklet, approaching the point from a slightly different direction, this is strikingly illustrated in the third Agnus of Missa Faysant regretz where, for the only time in the work, Josquin has the sopranos sing the complete superius line from the rondeau by Walter Frye (one source has Binchois) on which the mass is based, over the intricate counterpoint in the three lower parts. Missa D’ung aultre amer is eccentric. A remarkably brief Gloria clocks in at below two minutes, with a motet Tu solus qui facis mirabilia replacing the Benedictus, the final section of which, “Audi nostra suspiria”, begins with a striking passage in the style of mediaeval faburden, comparable with a similar briefer moment at “qui locutus est” in the Credo of the Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie, and the entire mass concludes with an exquisite cadence.

For all Ercole’s entitled narcissism, it is mountainously to the credit of Josquin that his mass can be appreciated on its own terms as a piece of music without an awareness – or at least without taking any notice – of the repetitions of the autarchic Ercole’s name, no more than one needs to focus upon the plainsong while listening to an In nomine. In the accompanying booklet, Peter Phillips notes favourite passages in this and the other masses. These are the insights of someone who has conducted and indeed lived these eighteen works, experiencing them profoundly from the inside. From the humble outside, I would particularly mention the many wonderful passages in two parts in this mass, particularly “pleni sunt caeli” from the Sanctus, and all the duets in the first Agnus. Overall it is one of the major masses in this remarkable series.

The series began with what was even then almost frighteningly fine performances of the Missae Pange lingua and La sol fa mi re. The former gained all the attention, but for this listener it was the latter which left me even more astonished at both the music and the performance: I expected Pange lingua to be great, but was taken aback at the quality of a work more from the margins of Josquin’s output, its qualities laid bare by the forensically beautiful singing of The Tallis Scholars under Peter Phillips. And here they still are, 34 years later, doing a major work full justice and laying bare the glories of two more of those marginal masses.

Richard Turbet

Categories
Recording

Music is the Cure

La Ninfea's Musical Medicine Chest

Or La Ninfea’s Musical Medicine Chest
Minko Ludwig tenor, La Ninfea
67:10
Perfect Noise PN1904

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Music by Henry Purcell, Anthony Holborne, Giles Farnaby, Lully, Marais, Charpentier and Tobias Hume is linked here by traditional tunes and improvised divisions in a regular chemist’s shop of sickness and cures. La Ninfea have trawled far and wide through the music of the Renaissance and the early Baroque to find pieces with medical resonances and have come up with a pleasing programme on their theme, which includes some familiar and unfamiliar songs and instrumental music, ranging from the predictable Purcell glees to unanticipated dips into French Baroque opera. There is an engaging contemplative quality about their accounts here, particularly in the very free divisions, which almost take on the ambience of improvisatory jazz. The playing is generally very convincing, and the blend between the instruments and with the voice pleasant and persuasive. I like the way the improvisatory quality of the divisions seems to spill over and pervade all of the tracks. The dance movements have an involving swing to them, while the performers seem to enjoy exploring the textural potential of their instruments.

D. James Ross

Categories
Book

Palestrina for All : Unwrapping, singing, celebrating

Jonathan Boswell's book on Palestrina

Jonathan Boswell
ISBN 9781721-968954

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This volume, self-published by the author, and produced and distributed by eBook Partnership is intended to address a perceived gap in the market for an accessible introduction to Palestrina and his music for the non-specialist reader – the title hints at this, and the information on the back of the publication spells it out in further detail, suggesting that it will be ‘welcomed by early music fans, choral singers and church musicians, and by thoughtful, imaginative music lovers.’

I may not be in the front line of Mr Boswell’s target audience, so I have tried to approach his publication with an open mind and with an eye on his intended public. In his opening chapter, the author helpfully lays out his plan campaign, as well as hinting at his methodology. Presumably in deference to his target audience, he states that he will ‘avoid too many technical terms’, and in a general chapter plan he promises an account of Palestrina’s career and life story as well as a treatment of aspects of the composer’s style and more detailed analysis of the Mass settings.

When I got down to reading the text itself, it seemed that the author was all too willing to depart from his promised structure, with bits of biography bleeding into sections of analysis and vice versa. I found the sections on Palestrina’s life and the context of his career the most interesting, and there were occasional genuine insights into how the intellectual fashions of the time would have influenced his music. Too often, though, there were sweeping general statements, which were simply inaccurate. The assertion at the opening of chapter 8 that Palestrina’s music was largely ‘in limbo’ for three centuries is just nonsense – it influenced composers throughout this period, and of all the Renaissance composers Palestrina was the one whose polyphony continued to be sung and copied and imitated until he was joined by his contemporaries in the great 20th-century rediscovery. Too often such sweeping statements of dubious accuracy stand in for genuine fact-based analysis – is this the inevitable result of the author’s aspiration to popularise his subject matter?

To look in more detail at the text, already in this introductory chapter, I encountered an aspect of the author’s writing style, which I found to be an issue throughout the rest of the book. Mr Boswell is prone to express himself in rather opaque turns of phrase. I could cite numerous examples of sentences, which I had to reread several times and some of which I am not sure I ever got to the bottom of. It is only fair that I should give some representative examples :

In the opening paragraph of the book we have –

‘A highly eventful reception and discussion history followed, focussing among inexorable and perennial issues about music, its cultural influence and complex meanings.’

In chapter 4 we have –

‘There is a marked contrast with styles which disclose a large-scale purposive design where everything seems to develop according to a virtuosic master plan.’

Towards the end of the book we have –

‘Palestrina’s counterpoint follows a different path. The texts are centre-of-attention, not woven into enveloping musical structures, however beautiful. Bald description and pure repetition are avoided.’

I have limited myself to three examples, and could, of course, be accused of taking phrases out of context, but in all honesty, context did not clarify any of these statements for me, nor the many other obscure sentences and phrases throughout the book. Many passages read like a bad translation from a foreign language, but as far as I can ascertain English is the author’s first language. I puzzled long and hard about why I found the author’s style so regularly impenetrable, and think it is principally due to two things. Firstly, this is a book, which was in urgent need of a hands-on editor to ask the vital question, ‘Just what do you mean by that?’ (Such an editor would also incidentally have picked up on some of the many typographical shortcomings.) Secondly, I think it is impossible to analyse contrapuntal music in the degree of detail to which the author aspires without the technical terminology he has consciously denied himself – as a result, I think he is often simply inventing his own technical terminology, which frequently means nothing to anybody except himself.

One example would be the term ‘lead’, sometimes expressed as ‘melodic lead’. This would appear to be the author’s term for the cantus firmus, but not always, and sometimes bafflingly he also uses the term cantus firmus, or rather fermus (sic). This sort of mess seems to me inevitable if you deny yourself recourse to technical terms, but then aspire to analyse without them.

The analysis, particularly of the selected mass movements, aspires to musicology, but again without the technical terms to express the main concepts the author seems to engage in the most eccentric fields of analysis. There are several tables recording aspects of Palestrina’s Masses, which seem entirely without relevance. One table expresses the redeployment frequencies of voice parts. Even after reading the surrounding text several times, I am not entirely clear what this even means, let alone why anybody would be interested in these statistics. Is he talking about the density of the polyphony? I really don’t know. More immediately comprehensible, but equally irrelevant is the table laying out the percentage of bars sung by each voice in 12 Kyrie sections, while the statistical analyses of ‘developments of melodic leads’ and the proportions of settings which open with specific voice parts also seem like analysis gone rogue.

So to return to my original mission, has the author made Palestrina’s music more accessible to a general audience? I think that a general reader would struggle as much as I did with Mr Boswell’s eccentric turn of phrase, perhaps even more so without the framework of technical terminology to fall back upon. Would a general reader have any more use than I had for the statistical tables, addressing apparently irrelevant aspects of the composer’s music? Almost definitely not. As I have already suggested, the biographical sections of the book are generally accurate, while their factual nature helps avoids them being infelicitously expressed, so they would probably provide a useful context for anyone listening to Palestrina’s music. However, it has to be said that it is not as easy as the introduction suggests to fillet this information out of the rest of the text. And of course, in the days of Wikipedia, most of the generally agreed biographical material is available online, where it can also be updated. More worryingly, a non-specialist reader would come away from the text with a number of serious misconceptions – that certain passages in Palestrina are badly written, when in fact the author for some reason just doesn’t like them, or indeed that Palestrina’s vocal lines lie comfortably for singers. Try telling that to your amateur tenor section! I will concede that Mr Boswell may be right in identifying the need for an accessible text to support the general listener to or singer of Palestrina’s music, but in all honesty this isn’t it.

D. James Ross

Categories
Concert-Live performance

Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival 2020

Inside one of the grand rooms of Hatfield House

Iestyn Davies (countertenor) and Elizabeth Kenny (lute) – Dowland
Richard Gowers (organ) – Handel, Tomkins, Byrd and Tallis
Friday 18 September 2020

Founded by the British cellist Guy Johnson nine years ago, the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival was one of the relatively few events in Britain to have survived this most catastrophic of years for music making, albeit by adapting itself to the prevailing conditions. Four concerts were filmed and presented before members of the owner Lord Salisbury’s family for relay on YouTube on Friday evenings during September. They were given in several of Hatfield House’s historic and spectacular rooms, the one reviewed here taking place in the magnificent Long Gallery (pictured above) and the Armoury, the home of a historic organ built in 1609.

I have to confess to being no great enthusiast for filmed concerts (or opera for that matter), but the close links between the Cecils (the family name of Lord Salisbury) and John Dowland made the gorgeous setting unusually appropriate and fascinating. It was to the courtier Sir Robert Cecil (from 1605 the 1st Earl of Salisbury) that Dowland wrote a famous letter, a mea culpa in which he tried to excuse himself from having become involved with Roman Catholic plotters in Florence on his aborted trip to Rome. Today the letter is housed in the archives of Hatfield House, allowing Iestyn Davies to take a break from the concert (one advantage of filming) to examine it, a touching moment.

In a trailer both Davies and Elizabeth Kenny spoke of how they had found that the historic associations added a dimension to their performances, feeling that the music resounded sympathetically from their surroundings. Certainly, the acoustic of the Long Gallery was lively, giving both voice and lute ample, rounded sonority. The concert included five of Dowland’s best-known songs and a pair of galliards, those dedicated to the King of Denmark and Lady Rich, for solo lute. Given the well-established qualities of both performers, the performances were never likely to be less than highly satisfying, expectations more than fulfilled. The sweetness and beauty of Davies’ countertenor is never in doubt and here he searched beneath the surface of the texts in a way that to my mind he does not always achieve. Reservations largely concerned the slow tempos at which he took the darkest numbers, including ‘Flow my tears’ and ‘In darkness let me dwell’, which for me resulted in both taking on a measure of 21st-century sentimentality that missed on the ambiguous aspects of Dowland’s attachment to the doleful. But the beautiful messa di voce which the concluding line of each verse of ‘Flow my tears’ ended was something to treasure. Otherwise, it might have been good to have had more varied embellishment in strophic songs, particularly one with as many verses as ‘Come again sweet love’, though Davies caught its light-hearted mood to perfection.

The second part of the concert moved to the Armoury for a short recital given by Richard Gowers on the 1609 organ supplied by John Haan, a Dutchman. One of the few organs from the period to survive, it also retains the beautiful decorations by Rowland Bucket, the artist responsible for many of the interior decorations of Hatfield House. The most substantial piece Gowers played was the second of Handel’s Six Fugues, while he also included the same composer’s mimetic voluntary known as ‘Flight of Angels’, Thomas Tomkins’ odd Voluntary in D and brief works by Byrd and Tallis. The organ has an extraordinarily translucent sound, yet also an agreeable mellowness. The playing was fluent, if not without the odd mishap.

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

Dowland: A Fancy

CD cover of Bor Zuljan Dowland lute recital

Bor Zuljan lute
65:57
Ricercar RIC 425

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For his debut solo recording, Bor Zulyan presents a programme of music by John Dowland (1563-1626), concentrating particularly on fantasies (eight altogether) offset with pieces of a less melancholic nature. He begins with “A Fantasia” from Jane Pickeringe’s lute book (fols 23v-24r), included by Diana Poulton as no. 71 under “Pieces of uncertain ascription”. (There is no attribution in the manuscript.) It is a stark opening to a CD – silence is broken by a solitary semibreve h on the first course, followed by two minims at the same pitch. This is the beginning of a slow descending chromatic scale, a theme similar to Dowland’s Forlorn Hope Fancy. Zuljan sustains the piece well through its contrasting sections: the theme now in semibreves, now in minims, supported by tripla crotchets in the bass, with fast semiquavers above, down the 7th course to the lowest note of the instrument, and finally above harmonies of mainly subdominant and tonic.
 
Next is “A Dream”, Poulton no. 75, another piece of uncertain ascription, but very much in Dowland’s style. It has three repeated sections, and looks like a pavan. In the editorial notes to her edition of Dowland’s music, Poulton argues convincingly that it may be a setting of Lady Layton’s Pavan. Full marks to Zulyan for his own divisions added for repeats, which are stylish and tasteful.
 
There follows a third piece of uncertain ascription, “A Fancy”, Poulton no. 73. The opening motif is similar to “All in a garden green”, and there is much which reminds one of Dowland’s Fantasy 1a. The last section has an extraordinary tremolo passage which climaxes with Dowland’s characteristic ending of alternating subdominant minor and tonic chords. The manuscript stops the tremolo for those chords, but Zuljan, with acceptable artistic licence, keeps it going over the chords so as not to lose momentum until the final bar. Exciting stuff.
 
The excitement continues with “Can she excuse” and “The Right Honourable Robert, Earl of Essex, His Galliard”, which are essentially two different settings of the same galliard. However, I feel Zulyan plays them rather too quickly, and it’s all a bit of a rush. His timing is 2’55” for both, which averages out at slightly less than 1’30” each. This compares with David Miller at 1’58”, Nigel North at 1’55”, and Paul  O’Dette at 1’45”.
 
There is much to enjoy here – 18 tracks in all – including a spirited performance of the well-known “Lady Hunsdon’s Puffe” (with a surprisingly abrupt ending) and “Sir John Smith, His Almain”. The CD ends with “Farewell”, a fantasy with a theme involving an ascending chromatic scale, which may have influenced, or been influenced by, Thomas Weelkes’ madrigal, “ Cease sorrows now”.
 
In the liner notes, Zuljan includes a lengthy account of John Dowland’s life. I raise an eyebrow at “He was most likely born in 1563 in Westminster, London or Dublin.” On page 21 of her book, John Dowland, Diana Poulton gives two pieces of unequivocal evidence supplied by Dowland himself that he was born in 1563, and she shows that Dr Grattan Flood’s idea that Dowland was born in Dalkey, Co. Dublin, is pure fancy.
 
Zulyan plays an 8-course lute in F (at A=440) after Venere (1582) built by Jiří Čepelák (Prague, 2012). It has a well-balanced sound with clear, bright treble notes. The strings are in gut, made by Davide Longhi from Corde Drago. The overall sound is pleasant on the ears, particularly in the bass with the characteristic sound of gut, and one can forgive an occasional over-exuberant open 6th course played for final chords of G major.
 
Zulyan has an impressive technique, and shows much sensitivity in his playing. I look forward to his next CD.
 
 
Stewart McCoy
Categories
Book

Walter Chinaglia: Towards  the Rebuilding of an Italian Renaissance-Style Wooden Organ

Chinaglia on rebuilding an organo di legno

Deutsches Museum Verlag, Volume 5, 2020
97pp, ISBN 978-3-940396-97-6 €19.95

This significant monograph details Chinaglia’s research into the making of a copy of the famous and only surviving Italian-style organo di legno in the Silberne Kapelle of the Hofkirche in Innsbruck, Austria. It was undertaken during a residency with the research group on ‘The Materiality of Musical Instruments: New Approaches to a Cultural History of Organology’, based in the Deutsches Museum in 2018.

When I was looking for an organo di legno for a number of performances of the Monteverdi Vespers this April in Lombardy, I was introduced to Walter Chinaglia. I knew that Italian music of that period needed a real organo di legno, with narrow-scaled open wooden pipes rather than the commonly available chamber organs based on a stopped 8’ flute, as I believed it would give more body and securer tonality for the singers and players alike with its unforced, singing tone. I was planning to perform with just eight singers and a minimal band, so the right organ was crucial. Alas, that project fell victim to the lockdown, but what I heard of his organs encouraged me enormously. Margaret Phillips has one in her collection at Milborne Port in Dorset, and there are a series of four youtube videos on his project – Duoi organi per Monteverdi, which I much recommend:

            https://www.organa.it/monteverdi/

There you can hear what the unforced sound of the open principal wood pipes is like with voices.

Chinaglia has an interesting background. After a first degree in physics and five years of research in nonlinear optics, he set up his workshop Organa in 2001, and has been building organs and researching the history and making of historically informed instruments since. In I.3 (p. 18) of his monograph, Chinaglia sets out his philosophy: ‘I strongly believe that a perfect sound from a wooden pipe can only be achieved if it comes naturally from the newly built pipe, in one or two strokes: when mouth cut-up is wisely chosen and the wind-way is properly opened, no other adjustments being necessary (such as toe-hole regulation, or tricky positioning of the mouth cover).’ He is committed to following exactly the dimensions and cut-up of the Silberne Kapelle organ pipes, and the clear, unforced, singing tone that results. The pipe-feet are cut integrally with the pipe and are pyramidal, not turned and glued on later. There are split keys for D sharp and E flat, and G sharp and A flat, giving the most useful major thirds in E and B, while allowing for E flat major and F minor as well as C minor in the flat keys. There is an informative spectral analysis of the sounds of open and stopped pipes, and from metal as well as wooden pipes, and the whole is profusely illustrated by drawings and diagrams, as well as photos.

This project combines scholarship with pragmatic experience, the disciplines of physics and woodcraft (there is detailed analysis of the different ways in which to saw planks and the difference it makes), of historical research into the written sources of the period and organology today. As a record of this work in progress, its author should be congratulated on the comprehensive recording of every step and the Deutsches Museum on sponsoring such an important cross-disciplinary project in the service of us mere musicians, trying to re-create the sound-world – especially the vocal sound-world – that Monteverdi and his forbears, contemporaries and successors inhabited. Vocal production and the difference that the right organ accompaniment makes lags far behind the recovery of the sound-world of strings (both bowed and plucked), brass, flauti and cornetti. These organs will help us immeasurably.

David Stancliffe

The book is freely available online, but you can buy a copy directly from the publisher here:

https://www.deutsches-museum-shop.com/detail/index/sArticle/3925/sCategory/24

Categories
Recording

Sheppard: Media vita in morte sumus

Alamire, Skinner, Sheppard: In media vita

Alamire, David Skinner
16:30
Inventa INV1003

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“Beyond glorious … monumental”. These words are used by David Skinner, director of Alamire, in his notes accompanying this recording, to describe – without one atom of exaggeration – the music of John Sheppard in general and his antiphon Media vita in morte sumus in particular. Another word, sublime, has been worked near to death (sic) in recent decades, but in its essential meaning it too applies to this work. Indeed, no praise can be too high for this musical creation. It is one of those few works that one feels could almost represent Creation itself. It has been recorded a number of times over recent decades by a variety of distinguished ensembles, and here, another of the finest choirs in the realm performs this incomparable masterpiece, but in a new version never before recorded. At just over sixteen measured but purposeful minutes it is about half the length of the longest rendition of the hitherto accepted format, a riveting tour de force by the Choir of Westminster Cathedral (Hyperion CDA68187). And this is the point: between themselves, as David explains in his excellent notes, he and two other distinguished musicologists, Jason Smart and John Harper, have arrived at the conclusion that Sheppard’s musical volcano should consist of fewer repetitions than the version hitherto accepted and recorded, not shedding any of the actual music and retaining much of the chant, simply ordered differently. The recording itself dates from 2012, when Alamire was involved in a project for BBC television which featured an eminent historian who, in the current cultural climate, cannot be named (clue: he is No Relation of The Beatles’ drummer) but a commercial recording was not released at the time. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and reworking of the audio files, from what was the previously accepted version, “happened during the Covid-19 lockdown” resulting in this premiere of what could well be the version of his masterwork that Sheppard might have expected to hear. Notwithstanding the evidence imparted by David, it is perhaps not impossible that there will be those who maintain the integrity of the previously accepted format. Pace David’s surprising defensiveness about “maintaining balance and interest [reviewer’s italics] in modern performance” – surely this is music of the spheres, that should be continuous and without end – this new dispensation deprives the listener of some repetitions of Sheppard’s heavenly polyphony, but then again one can always repeat the new version! Indeed, the revised format might make the work more accessible to choirs cautious about programming a single work from the 16thcentury that usually lasts 20-30 minutes. Alamire’s performance is excellent; for a choir which, as its director observes, “tend[s] to lean towards those darker sonorities” there could have been more pneumatic drill from the basses, but given the dimensions of the choir and the acoustic in which they were recorded, the pacing and blend are fine. In terms of the value of the music and the quality of the performance, not to mention the considerable amount of research behind it, this recording is a snip. It is recommended without hesitation. Don’t even wait just a minute – buy it now.

Richard Turbet

Categories
Recording

In chains of gold: The English pre-Reformation verse anthem, volume 2

English pre-Restoration verse anthems Byrd Bull Hooper Mundy CD cover

William Byrd to Edmund Hooper: psalms and royal anthems
Magdalena Consort, Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, Silas Wollston organ
70:29
Signum Classics SIGCD609

Byrd: Hear my prayer, O Lord rebuke me not, Have mercy upon me O God Fantasia BK46, Teach me O Lord, Christ rising again, I will give laud, Look and bow down Bull: Almighty God which by the leading of a star, Fantasia MB 16, Deliver me O Go. Cosyn: Voluntaries 1 and 3 Morley: Out of the deep Hooper: Hearken ye nations, O God of gods John Mundy: Sing joyfully

We were lucky enough to receive two copies of this recording for review, and here are the two reactions to it. Firstly (in the order in which they arrived in my inbox!), Richard Turbet then David Stancliffe.

This is the second volume in the series which began with a well-received disc of all the surviving consort anthems by Orlando Gibbons. It features Byrd, plus his pupils Morley and Bull, and their contemporaries Edmund Hooper and John Mundy, with organ solos by Benjamin Cosyn. The music itself is varied and of the highest quality, the performers are among the finest in this repertory, the scholarship behind it is in the distinguished hands of Andrew Johnstone whose doctoral thesis is on Byrd’s Anglican music, and the artistic director is Bill Hunt, founder-member of Fretwork who, at the time of writing, is engaged upon a doctoral thesis about consort anthems.

The proceedings get off to the best possible start with the first of three Byrd premieres: Byrd’s oeuvre runs to well over five hundred works, and his entire repertories of Latin, keyboard and consort music have been recorded. However, there are many gaps in the English-texted music, both sacred – liturgical as well as domestic – and secular. Hear my prayer, O Lord is one of Byrd’s three surviving verse anthems (with an accompaniment for the organ and therefore intended for use in the Anglican liturgy) but Andrew Johnstone feels that he has evidence that it originated as a consort anthem, with an accompaniment for viols indicating domestic performance. Although this is open to interpretation, it is entirely appropriate to be open to alternative possibilities and to air them in a project such as this. In any event, this piece is a gem and its eventual appearance on a commercial recording is greatly to be welcomed. O Lord rebuke me not is the second of Byrd’s surviving liturgical verse anthems on this disc, and again Andrew Johnstone feels that there is evidence of domestic origins. There have been a couple of previous recordings of it with an organ by cathedral choirs (Salisbury and Lichfield), but it is no less welcome here in this experimental – and, who knows, perhaps authentic – guise. The third of Byrd’s trio of surviving liturgical verse anthems Teach me O Lord is performed as such, with organ, but with an intriguing slant to its interpretation. The verse is in triple time, and the chorus in duple. Normally this is performed as dotted semibreve = semibreve when passing from verse to chorus (with the reverse from chorus to verse), as in volume 10a of The Byrd Edition (p. 43 passim) or simply retaining the value of each note, i.e. semibreve = semibreve. In this recording the verse and chorus are rendered with a proportional relationship between the triple and duple sections, resulting in the verse being sung much more briskly than is usually the case. Having recovered from the initial surprise and listened several times, I am still not convinced, but none of us were there at the time, Byrd’s manuscript does not survive, contemporary sources are inconsistent, and insufficient research has been published, so it is again thoroughly worthwhile to use this recording as a vehicle for such an experiment.

The second of Byrd’s premieres is I will give laud, one of several fragmentary songs that survive in a lutebook from the Paston collection from which crucial parts are missing, hence their skeletal appearance in volume 16 of The Byrd Edition. Andrew Johnstone has done heroic work in making this song performable, and there is word of a forthcoming publication containing several other such Byrd reconstructions. The text is the usual excruciating paraphrase of a psalm, in this case the luckless XXXIV, perpetrated by Thomas Sternhold, and the form is ten verses sung by a soloist in the measure of a galliard, accompanied by a quintet of viols, with a chorus repeating the final two lines of alternate verses.

The third of the trio of Byrd premieres is the majestic Look and bow down. Byrd, who was what we would nowadays call the Master of the Queen’s Musick, sets a poem by Queen Elizabeth thanking God for assisting mainly Herself in seeing off the Spanish Armada in 1588. Again, major reconstructive musical surgery was required from Andrew Johnstone. (At least two previous attempts, by experts on respectively Byrd and the Paston sources, had been made, to try to create a performable song out of the intractable fragments.) It was first sung outside St Paul’s Cathedral, so the decision was taken for this recording to use an accompaniment of winds, as would have been the practice at the time. Mean and triplex soloists respectively sing the first two verses, the final lines echoed by the chorus, then the soloists join together in the final verse, to make a glorious conclusion with the four wind instruments, the organ and, for the repetition of the final couplet, all the available singers. The resulting sound is magnificent, with the prevailing dignified minor tonality giving way to a moving evocation of “The soul of me his turtledove” in the final line.

That concludes the Byrd half of the disc, and it is followed by Bull’s famous Starre Anthem and Deliver me, O God, another premiere, which is set to a text said also to be by the Queen celebrating the defeat of the Armada. Towards the end of the record are two powerful anthems by Edmund Hooper, a fine composer who seems to have been neglected simply because of the sheer number of gifted contemporaries. He is no less gifted than most of them, however, and although there is a fine recording of his services and anthems by The Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge under Andrew Gant (Lammas LAMM 096D), these two works receive their premieres on the present disc. Hearken ye nations is a bracingly grumpy work which loquaciously celebrates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, while O God of gods was composed for the Accession Day of James I as king of England and, like Byrd’s Look and bow down, ropes in winds, a substantial chorus, and even a session musician on tenor dulcian, to bring the proceedings to an appropriately regal conclusion.

All the other pieces on this disc – the better-known anthems needing less editorial labour and the works for organ – go towards making this a most attractive and enthralling programme, supported by a booklet that is both scholarly and readable. From an engineering point of view, just occasionally the second vocal line down could have been given more presence (such as in the third verse of Look and bow down), otherwise this recording sounds as elevated as the quality of the music it presents. The performances leave nothing to be desired. The viols and wind are, as I have already said, the top of their profession. All the singers are excellent, among whom Elisabeth Paul and Zoe Brookshaw (“mean” and “triplex”) have prominent roles. But every individual performer, alongside their technical and musicological colleagues, has been crucial in making this an outstanding disc.

Richard Turbet

This is the second volume of Bill Hunt’s great project to edit and record the corpus of pre-Restoration Verse Anthems, of which Volume 1, focussing on Gibbons, appeared in 2018 and was reviewed in January of that year.

This second volume has a wonderful range of music starting with William Byrd and moving through John Bull and Thomas Morley, interspersed with short voluntaries for the organ by Benjamin Cosyn, to John Mundy and the great discovery for me – Edmund Hooper, whom I only knew as the composer of a set of evensong canticles. Three of Byrd’s penitential psalms begin the programme, and after Teach me, O Lord, Christ rising again and I will give laud (a splendid five-part reconstruction by Andrew Johnstone of a swinging lyric rather in the manner of Though Amaryllis dance in green), comes Look and bow down, a setting of words by Queen Elizabeth herself which was ‘performed at Sainte Pauls crosse in London’. It is accompanied by cornets and sackbuts on this recording as in all probability it was sung outside the cathedral after the Bishop of Salisbury’s sermon at the conclusion of the service to give thanks for deliverance from the Spanish Armada.

One of the welcome features of this distinguished recording is the care taken to make the texts clearly audible. This is where the Reformation concern for the clarity and audibility of the text and the musical seconda prattica championed by Monteverdi and the composers of the new dramatic word-settings emanating from Italy coincided. I particularly enjoyed the Magdalena Consort’s director Peter Harvey articulating the bass verses in John Mundy’s Sing Joyfully with such clarity and feeling: it is not always easy to make the bass part in such music melodically interesting as well as so wonderfully resonant. His rock-steady pitching against which the other voices can tune is a model for this kind of consort singing. For drama, I admired Benedict and Hugo Hymas’ passionate declamation and articulation of the expressive words – again possibly by Queen Elizabeth – in Bull’s Deliver me, O God, which follows his well-known ‘Starre Anthem’.

The ensemble singing is outstanding. This struck me most forcibly when the full voices entered after Elizabeth Paul’s opening verse with the viols in Byrd’s O Lord, rebuke me not. Breathing as one, the singers with the admirable Eleanor Minney on top contrive an organ-like unanimity of sound that contrasts with the single voice verse. Such alternation between a single voice with viols and this rich homophonic sound is a characteristic of the verse anthem genre, and throws the text into prominence by repeating it word for word. Only Andrew Johnstone’s illuminating note on the Byrd settings reveals that he is the reconstructing detective of several of these pieces, so imperceptible is his skilful hand, and I look forward to many of his Byrd reconstructions coming into the public domain.

While the singing is agile as well as rich (listen to the nimble rhythms in Christ rising again), the playing is equally elegant. Fretwork shares the bulk of it, and their sinuous lines weave a magical backdrop to the voices. Mostly the singers pick up a responsive style – much of this is music for private chapels and long galleries rather than the formal worship of church services, so a reflective, understated style is called for in many pieces. To my mind, only Zoë Brookshaw sometimes sings with too much vibrato on unimportant notes; otherwise, the singers vary their style between verse and chorus very perceptively.

But the real triumph of this project is to unite scholarship, performance practice and passionate music-making. Often two of these three are fulfilled, but rarely all three. You can sense the energy and passion in the project from the commitment of the musicians, all skilled practitioners in their fields. But behind them stand Andrew Johnstone and Bill Hunt – the presiding genius. And as always with Bill’s projects, there are unanswered questions: for me, the one I hope to pursue is that about the music desk in Bishop Andrewes’ chapel. I have a very clear memory of an enclosed pew with a central desk on the right-hand side of the chapel at Wolvsey, the palace of the Bishops of Winchester near the cathedral in Winchester. Am I right in thinking that this might well have held a consort of viols? Certainly, the substantial mediaeval chapel with its distinctive ‘Laudian’ fittings has never, as far as I know, had an organ.

To raise more questions than you answer and to excite your followers with the same passion to find out more is the mark of all inspired educators, and this CD is with its splendid notes is a fine example of that.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Amor, Fortuna et Morte

Amor Fortuna et Morte CD cover

Madrigals by de Rore, Luzzaschi, Gesualdo & Monteverdi
Profeti della Quinta
64:21
Pan Classics PC 10396

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This collection of madrigals has been compiled for the excellent reason that the singers of the Profeti della Quinta love singing them. Interestingly the composers they choose span the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries – Cipriano de Rore was born in 1515/6 and died in 1565, while Monteverdi was born in 1567 and died in 1643. While there is considerable variety here, various musical and thematic threads run all the way through the programme. The five male voices, joined in the later works by lute, achieve a remarkable blend and purity of intonation, and sing these madrigals with intense expression and musical intelligence. In addition to some very familiar material, we have an extraordinary madrigal by Scipione Lacorcia, who manages to outdo his model Gesualdo in harmonic eccentricity and melodic waywardness! The recording of Monteverdi’s “Lamento della Ninfa” (13) is a hair-raising aberration, as one of the group’s male altos hideously droops and swoops around Monteverdi’s melodic line in a style verging on caricature. Famously, Monteverdi asks the soloist to sing ‘at the beat of the emotions’ – however, this clearly means singing with a degree of mensural freedom rather than approximating the actual notes in a sort of anachronistic Sprechgesang. Just awful, but mercifully unique on the CD. Interspersed among the madrigals, we also have a number of pieces for solo lute, some of them very effective arrangements of madrigals. Founded in Galilee by the eminent singer/harpsichordist/director/composer Elam Rotem, Profeti della Quinta is now based in Basel.

D. James Ross