Tag: Vocal music

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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

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Recording

Steffani: A son très humble service

CD cover Steffani duets for Hannover

Duets for Sophie Charlotte of Hanover
Various singers and continuo, Jory Vinikour (hpd), dir
89:22
musica omnia mo0802 (2 CDs)

The words in the heading are taken from the dedication made in 1702 by Agostino Steffani to Queen Sophie Charlotte in Berlin in a letter accompanying two volumes of his chamber duets. Exceptionally cultured and herself a singer and keyboard player sufficiently accomplished to take the role of continuo harpsichordist in Giovanni Battista Bononcini’s Polifemo, produced at court in the same year, Sophie Charlotte had been acquainted with Steffani for many years. The unusually close relationship between the two, fully discussed in the exceptionally detailed booklet notes by Steffani scholar Colin Timms and probably facilitated by the fact that the ubiquitously talented Steffani was also a diplomat, is evidenced in a number of surviving letters.

The duets are scored for a variety of vocal combinations. Unlike the alternation of recitative and aria familiar from the slightly later chamber duets of Scarlatti and Handel, they take a variety of flexible forms, all through-composed. Often the structure will consist of some kind of ritornello or rondeau scheme, sometimes, as in ‘Ah che l’ho sempre detto’ for soprano and tenor, returning at the end to the brief opening da capo aria to complete a cyclical form. This incidentally is one of several instances where the text printed in the booklet does not make clear what is repeated. In their fluidity of form, the duets bear a relationship to both earlier 17th century opera and the later madrigal. The latter are also at times evoked by the frequent use of dissonance and chromaticism in vocal writing that is always cajoling the voices into obedient imitation or closely intertwined counterpoint. That of course is appropriate for texts that invariably deal with the vicissitudes of love in either serious or playful mood. Unique among the eleven duets recorded here is the touching final duet, ‘Io mi parto, o cara vita’, scored for soprano and tenor and cast in dialogue form between two lovers on parting. The overall quality of the duets is extremely high, some, such as ‘Pria ch’io faccia altrui palese’ for two sopranos, being sensuously lovely.

Emanating from the US, the set is a follow up to an earlier collection under the direction of harpsichordist Jory Vinikour that I reviewed previously for EMR. There are several differences in the vocal line-up, only Canadian soprano Andréanne Brisson Paquin and bass Mischa Bouvier being common to both recordings. There is now a second soprano, Sherezade Panthaki, who combines most effectively with Paquin in three duets. Reginald L. Mobley, a stylish countertenor and Scott J. Brunscheen’s light lyric tenor complete the roster. Despite these changes, the performances remain very much on a par with those on the earlier CD. That is to say they are all pleasingly sung, though ornaments are often poorly articulated and there are too few of them, without the singers ever suggesting that they have found anything in the text to engage them. True the texts (one of which is by Sophie Charlotte) are all conceits, often, in keeping with the end of the 17th century, pastoral in nature, but we are told over and over again in vocal treatises of the period that realisation of the text is paramount. Highly emotional words such as ‘lasciami’ and ‘tradirà’ must evoke vocal acting if the duets are to come fully to life and move the listener. Here that hardly ever happens. The continuo accompaniment is capable if a little unimaginative, which has the advantage of not detracting from the singers.

These performances are so well-intentioned that I would love to give them higher praise. The fact is however that this is music that is deceptively simple, needing as it does art that transcends artifice.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Charpentier: Messe à quatre chœurs

CD cover Charpentier Messe a quatres chœurs

Carnets de voyage d’Italie
Ensemble Correspondances, Sébastien Daucé
TT
hamonia mundi HMM902640

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This programme is one of those ‘the composer may have visited here, heard music like this and then written this’ concepts, in this case credible and not pushed too hard in Graham Sadler’s fluent note. Most of the music (roughly two thirds) of the music is Italian and excellent it is too, in both content and execution, so full marks to whoever did the painstaking research this kind of thing requires. Cavalli’s Sonata is the stand-out for me, but very much as a primus inter pares. Charpentier is represented by extremes – a motet for three unaccompanied voices (SSA) and his mass for four choirs. This is sonically splendid with rich antiphonal effects, though the tutti sections have choirs doubling each other so the number of simultaneous independent parts is never more than seven. My preference is always for masses to interspersed with other music and not treated like later symphonies (we do not even get the organ interludes Charpentier requests), but that aside this release is very strongly recommended for both content and performances, which are stylish and expressive but never self-indulgent.

David Hansell

This is one of two releases I have reviewed as downloads this month. As such it is not possible to comment in the usual way on the overall physical presentation of the package but a few comments on the download experience are appropriate. This is no longer a novelty, of course, and the process for both the music and the booklet is perfectly straightforward. However, any printing of the booklet material needs care and may need a few experiments with single pages to find the optimum settings for both size and format. In particular beware of pages that are black with white print (a bad design idea anyway) and you may not want to print pages that are not in your language or which contain material of only passing interest. And do not assume that all publications from the same source will work in the same way! Once you get there you will find an excellent programme note (French, English and German), but the sung Latin texts are translated into French only.

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Recording

Charpentier: Méditations pour le Carême

CD cover of Les Surprises Charpentier Pour le Carême

Ensemble Les Surprises, Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas
59:49
Ambronay AMY056

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Charpentier’s cycle of Lenten meditations, some of which are dramatised biblical scenes, are preserved only in Sébastien de Brossard’s manuscript collection. Brossard himself described the music as ‘excellent’ and he wasn’t wrong! Charpentier’s melodic and contrapuntal skills are present in abundance, and are enriched by moments of harmonic asperity which still startle even post-Wagner ears.

The scoring is for male voice trio with continuo and I do admire the way in which the singers switch from dramatic characterisation to more ‘objective’ meditation and/or narration while maintaining the balance of the ensemble, phrase shapes and so on. I am less convinced by the approach to the continuo. I do not enjoy, nor do I think historically likely, the changing sonorities within a motet, still less omitting the continuo entirely even though the composer wrote the part. I also doubt the use of a harpsichord in sacred repertoire.

Also in the programme are two fine motets by Brossard and beautifully played instrumental pieces by de Visée and Marais, though over-fiddly continuo disposition distracts from the fine melodic line in the latter.

The booklet (French and English) covers all the bases.

David Hansell

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Recording

de Lalande: Les Fontaines de Versailles, Le Concert d’Esculape

CD cover of de Lalande Les Fontaines de Versailles

Margot Rood, Aaron Sheehan, Jesse Blumberg, Boston Early Music Festival Vocal & Chamber Ensembles, Paul O’Dette, Stephen Stubbs, Robert Mealy
72:55
cpo 555 097-2

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Well, for any who think of Lalande solely as a composer of splendid grands motets and other sacred music, here is the secular corrective in the shape of two delightful one-acters first performed in 1683, revived by the Boston Early Music Festival in 2016 and finally recorded in 2019. In Les Fontaines…, the gods and goddesses represented in the Versailles garden statuary pay tribute to the king, while Le concert …, first heard a few weeks later, compliments a leading physician of the time who served the court, especially the Dauphine.

Thorough preparation and unity of purpose are the hallmarks of Boston productions and the performances here maintain this tradition. The singing captures well the elusive style required and the instrumental contributions sparkle. The continuo section is particularly good – sonorous and supportive without ever becoming silly or intrusive. Overall musical continuity between the short numbers is also excellent.

Between the dramatic items, we hear a Grande Pièce from the collection of ‘background music’ that Lalande composed to accompany meals at Versailles. Apparently, this was a favourite of the king and the players take the chance to show us why – I especially enjoyed the liberation of the bassoon from the bass line to a melodic tenor register role.

The booklet (English, German and French) is a chunky affair with a lengthy (though also very good) essay, the usual performer biographies and texts/translations. But I have to say that I found the font size a challenge and whoever was in charge of production should have allowed for the binding space needed on the inner margins of each page. It’s always a shame when the performers are not perfectly supported in such matters: this ensemble deserves nothing less.

David Hansell

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Recording

Sturm und Drang 2

Ian Page The Mozartists Sturm udn Drang volume 2

Ida Ränslöv mezzo, The Mozartists, Ian Page
71:39
Signum SIGCG 636
Works by Haydn, Gluck, Vanhal, Mysliveček, J. C. Bach

This is the second in a projected series of seven CDs devoted to the so-called ‘Sturm und Drang’ (storm and stress) movement, in fact not a movement at all but an outpouring of passionate, often turbulent emotional outbursts across literature, music and painting primarily between the 1760s and early 1780s. Although the name stems from literature, being particularly associated with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, the music associated with it was mostly composed a decade or more earlier. There appear to be no philological links between the literature and the music, Ian Page’s characteristically informative notes suggesting that Sturm und Drang may simply be a reaction against the charm and gentility of the mid-18th century rococo style.

G minor was a key that particularly lent itself to the turbulence of such fierce emotions. The present disc includes particularly fine examples in symphonies by Haydn and J. C. Bach and vocal works by Haydn and Mysliveček.

Haydn’s Symphony No 39 is not only archetypal of the genre, but also the earliest of a group of minor-key Sturm und Drang works (including string quartets and solo keyboard works in addition to symphonies) that form a highly important component of the middle years of his output. It is unusual in its scoring including four horns, a distinction that leads to suggestions that it exerted an influence not only on the minor key symphonies of Vanhal, at least four of which, including d1, are scored for four horns, but also the earlier of Mozart’s G minor symphonies, No 25, K 183, composed in 1773. Incidentally, in my view it is wrong to include Mozart’s great Symphony No 40 in G minor among Sturm und Drang works; its overall sentiment is one of profound universal sadness, tragedy even that goes beyond the stormy, hurtling drama of works of this kind. Equally, Johann Christian Bach’s Symphony in G minor, op 6/6 seems to belong to a less intense side of the genre, placing as its centre of gravity a deeply-felt C minor central movement that opens in the style of an operatic accompagnato before proceeding to a beautifully shaped melody built on ornamental arabesques. The whole symphony is an object lesson for those who think of Bach’s second son as a purveyor of little more than galant pleasantries.

Ian Page’s performances of all three symphonies are exemplary. Outer movements have a tremendous driving force, with fierce chords, highlighted dynamic contrasts – listen to the splendidly judged opening paragraphs of the opening Allegro assai of the Haydn – and fierce tremolandos. Also notable as a feature of the performances is the clarity with which the conductor reveals the contrapuntal detail of passages such as the development of the same movement, the importance given to such writing being one of the characteristic features of Sturm und Drang works. In the slow movements of the Haydn and Vanhal Page finds a lighter touch to reveal necessary respite from the fiery thrust of the outer movements, the pastoral serenity of the splendid Vanhal Andante arioso (with flutes replacing oboes) calling to mind Gluck’s Blessed Spirits. As is his custom, Page includes all marked repeats, especially valuable in the Vanhal, which becomes a far more substantial work than in the performance by Concerto Köln, where the total work clocks in at 14:22 against Page’s 21:49.

As with vol. 1 appropriate vocal works are interspersed with the symphonies. They include two extracts from Gluck’s Paride ed Elena (Vienna, 1770), the affecting aria ‘Fac me vere tecum flere’ from Haydn’s Stabat Mater (1768) and an aria di furia from Mysliveček’s setting of a standard Metastasio warhorse, Semiramide (Bergamo, 1776). They are sung by the young Swedish mezzo Ida Ränslöv, who the biography tells us has already sung a wide range of roles in her capacity as a member of Staatsoper Stuttgart and elsewhere. The voice itself has a lovely quality, displaying a tonal richness and variety of colour that bodes well for her future, though I suspect that might be concentrated on later music. Her interpretations here are satisfactory without showing any truly distinctive features. Ornamentation is extremely sparse and her Italian diction and enunciation suggest little detailed exploration of what lies below the surface of the music. Page gives her excellent support, while it would be wrong to conclude without giving generous recognition of the outstanding orchestral playing throughout.

Sturm und Drang is shaping up to be not only an eminently enjoyable series in its own right but an insightful collection of considerable value. Volume 3 can’t come soon enough!

Brian Robins

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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

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Recording

J. G. Graun: Torna vincitor

Johann Gottlieb Graun vocal and instrumental music CD

Cantatas & Viola da Gamba Concerto
Amanda Forsythe soprano, Opera Prima, Cristiano Contadin
78:26
cpo 555 284-2

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There were three brothers Graun that became musicians, although only  Johann Gottlieb (1702/3-1771) and Carl Heinrich (1703/4-1759) became significant composers. Both served Frederick the Great at Potsdam, J G as leader of Berlin orchestra from 1740, while C H became Kapellmeister in the same year. Today C H Graun is much the better known largely due to his great success in Berlin as an opera composer, a genre in which his brother showed no interest in competing. Otherwise, the closely paralleled careers of the Grauns have caused musicologists not inconsiderable difficulties as to attribution of their instrumental works.

One group, however, that is not in dispute are the works Johann Gottlieb wrote involving the viola da gamba. He probably first discovered an interest in the instrument during his time as orchestral leader at Merseburg in the 1720s, where he came into contact with the gambist and violinist Hertel. However, it seems likely that the greatest influence on Graun’s attachment to the gamba was the virtuoso Ludwig Christian Hesse, whose father had studied with Marais and Forqueray in Paris. Hesse became a leading figure in the musical entourage of the Berlin court, where he worked alongside Graun from 1740 until 1761, presumably the period from which the majority of the former’s 27 known gamba works date.   

The present CD includes three of these works, two large-scale cantatas for soprano, viola da gamba and strings and a three-movement Concerto in A minor, a work that has also been recorded by the great Italian gambist Vittorio Ghielmi (Astrée). The cantatas sung by the American soprano Amanda Forsythe are premiere recordings. Their texts are by Metastasio and like the operas of his brother (who set several of the great poet’s librettos) totally Italian in style. Both owe much to the pastoral movement, the first, ‘O Dio, Fileno’, concerning the laments of the shepherdess left by her lover to go to war, the oft-employed metaphor comparing love and war fully exploited in the long accompanied recitative that lies at the heart of the cantata. The enchanting ‘Già la sera’ takes a lighter look at love, as the lover tries to entice his Nice to leave the fields and live with him on the seashore, his enticements articulated in two arias which describe the alluring charms of eventide on the shoreline. Again they surround a long central accompagnato in which Nice is told she can become both ‘shepherdess and a fisher girl’. The needs to involve the concertante role for gamba and the fact that arias are in fully developed da capo form gives them an expansive scope, the first of the former work alone lasting for over 14 minutes. The writing for gamba, especially in ‘O Dio, Fileno’,

is extremely demanding, featuring rapid passagework and virtuoso polyphonic chordal writing. Perhaps its most appealing contribution comes in the opening aria of ‘Già la sera’, where voice and gamba work in sympathetic imitation to delightful effect.

The A-minor Concerto displays some of the nervous energy associated with Empfindsamkeit and also features much bravura writing for the gamba. In the outer movements, an opening orchestral statement is taken up by the gambist, its themes developed by the soloist in passaggi, chordal counterpoint and so forth. The central Adagio plays with ambiguity by alternating major and minor. It’s a moderately appealing work, less enticing here than in Ghielmi’s more characterful performance. Amanda Forsythe has a bright, pure soprano capable of agility and also sustaining cantabile lines with assurance, but it is difficult to avoid the feeling that she might have been heard to greater advantage in a less resonant acoustic than that provided by what sounds to be a large hall in the wonderful 16th century Villa Bolasco at Castelfranco in the Veneto. The long reverberation period allows the voice to spread uncomfortably in the upper range, but even making allowances for that her performances fall some way short of ideal. Passaggi and ornamentation are too frequently articulated without depth and far too little attention has been paid to diction and interpreting the text, though ‘Già la sera’ is not without the merit of generalized appeal and includes some impressive mezza voce singing. An interesting disc, then, but not an essential one.

Brian Robins      

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Recording

Buxtehude: Cantates pour voix seule

Cantatas for solo voice Buxtehude La Rêveuse

La Rêveuse, Maïlys de Villoutreys, Florence Bolton & Benjamin Perrot
65:00
MIRARE MIR442

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The music on this CD places Buxtehude between his predecessor at the Marienkirche in Lübeck, Franz Tunder (1614-1667) and some of his contemporaries – Johann Philipp Förtsch (1652-1732), Gabriel Schütz (1633-1710/11) and Christian Geist (c.1650-1711). The other thread is that six of the nine pieces come from that remarkable source of almost all of Buxtehude’s substantial vocal output, the Düben Collection. Assembled for the Swedish Court and now in the University Library in Uppsala, the collection is a reminder that the Hanseatic League, trading around ports on the Baltic, was a powerful system of international connections before the narrower nationalism of the late 17th century took root.

The cantatas and their interleaving sonatas are played in an intelligent and well-mannered way by La Rêveuse, a Parisian/Breton ensemble which can boast two violins, dessus, tenor and three basse de violes, harpsichord, organ (a five rank positif by Dominique Thomas 2012 in the Église Protestant in Paris) and theorbo. Six of the items are solo cantatas with the Breton soprano Maïlys de Villoutreys, who sings cleanly and clearly, avoiding excessive vibrato but well able to colour her singing appropriately.

This CD is a welcome insight into the North German school pre-Bach, tastefully performed. The music lets us hear the kind of repertoire that Buxtehude lived among and which no doubt figured in the famous Abendmusiken in Lübeck. The influence of Italy is present in the stile moderna traits of some of the vocal settings and in the instrumental sinfonias between some episodes, recalling the operas and oratorios of Cavalli and Carissimi and the last piece, Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab, is built on a recurring ostinato bass. I listened to the whole recital with great pleasure: the music is well-chosen, nothing jars in the disciplined but relaxed performance, and it is a good advertisement for the group’s commitment to an under-explored repertoire.

David Stancliffe

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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