Huelgas Ensemble

The general trend in recordings of Renaissance polyphony has been toward typing music to specific surroundings: royal festivities, religious feast days, and the like. This collection by the Huelgas Ensemble goes in the other direction, providing three CDs' worth of music ranging from the medieval era to Anton Bruckner, with most of the pieces falling into some stretch of the High Renaissance. The music was recorded, beautifully, in a Romanesque church near Dijon in 2018, and the program is unified loosely by a set of general guidelines for the selections at that event: the music emphasized "unknown repertoire, undeservedly obscure composers, and experiments that fall outside the scope of the normal concert season."

On "PraeBachtorius", works by Praetorius and Bach based on the same Lutheran chorales are ingeniously combined, so that the respective verses of Bach and Praetorius are heard immediately after each other. It is impressive how well Praetorius' music of the late Renaissance combines with Bach's baroque music to form a harmonious whole on this CD.

This recording is dedicated to German Renaissance composer Ludwig Daser. Paul Van Nevel and the Huelgas Ensemble have recorded two polyphonic masses by the Munich-born composer, who was a contemporary of famous composers such as Orlando di Lasso and Cipriano di Rore. Ludwig Daser came from a wealthy Munich family. His composition teacher was to be the then famous Ludwig Senfl.

The Antwerp based French printer Christophe Plantin (1520-1589) achieved international renown through his epic bible editions (e.g. the eight part “Biblia Regia”) and elaborate humanistic works by the likes of Justus Lipsius and the mathematician Simon Stevin. On the other hand, his fame as a publisher of ground-breaking music prints of esteemed sixteenth century composers, often presented as monumental choir books, seems today to have gone relatively unnoticed.

Renaissance music for the Tenebrae constitutes an endless fund of passionate and evocative polyphony. The nature and design of the texts beautifully articulates the music, alternating the single letter that opens each section with more expansive music for the Lamentations proper and ending with the words ‘Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’. There is no clear explanation why Paul van Nevel chose these four particular settings, but they do show some of the range of styles adopted across the years, opening with the little-known set by Tiburtio Massaino (published in 1599) and ending with the superb Good Friday set that is among the last works of Lassus.

The Huelgas-Ensemble presents another superbly sung, thoughtfully programmed recording that offers for our consideration what conductor Paul Van Nevel describes as “the three major styles of the Renaissance”, represented by Roman, Franco-Flemish, and English Late Gothic masses. It’s easy to understand the choice of Palestrina (Roman) and Lassus (Franco-Flemish)–but with Thomas Ashewell we truly have a horse of a different color, stylistically for sure, but also one with the most meager catalog (only two extant complete works, according to Van Nevel). The term “late Gothic” as applied to musical style also is not a common one, but Van Nevel obviously has carefully–and probably cleverly–chosen to demonstrate its aspects with Ashewell rather than with a more familiar yet more commonly heard contemporary composer such as Cornysh, Fayrfax, or Carver.

Le Jeune’s distinctive contribution to the French chanson marks him out as one of the genre’s essential figures. He is best known for having given musical voice to the concept of the vers mesure a l’antique. The pioneer of this poetic style, Antoine du Baif, sought to return to the simplicity of Greek verse with its clear rules of scansion. The Protestant Le Jeune responded with polyphonic settings in which melismas are abolished in favour of long or short notes of constant duration, corresponding to the strong/weak accentual patterns of the words. In his hands this seemingly daunting restriction is remarkably flexible, and other composers experimented with it, if only briefly (as in Lassus’s lovely Une puce).

Der heute leider weitgehend unbekannte flämische Komponist Jacob Clement alias Clemens non Papa (circa 1510 bis 1515 - 1555) war neben Palästrina und Orlando di Lasso einer der führenden Vertreter der Renaissance. Einerseits wurde er für seine geistlichen Werke bei seinen Auftraggebern und Kollegen sehr hoch geschätzt, andererseits eilte ihm der Ruf des Lebemannes voraus, der weltlichen Freuden und Genüssen nicht gerade abgeneigt war. Vielleicht ist es diese Lebenserfahrung und Inspiration, die ihn auch zu einem hervorragenden Komponisten von Chansons und weltlichen Liedern gemacht hat. Seine auffällig virtuose Beherrschung des Kontrapunktes steht in jedem Fall außer Frage.

Music appreciation textbooks and timelines in magazines often name Guillaume Dufay as the first great composer of the European Renaissance, but one might equally call him the last great composer of the Middle Ages. This disc presents all 13 of Dufay's isorhythmic motets–the final masterpieces of a very medieval-minded genre. During the Middle Ages, music was considered a science (just like mathematics), and isorhythmic motets are constructed according to strict arithmetical principles. In addition, each voice generally has a different text, while the fundamental voice (called the tenor) usually has no text at all and is often (as here) performed by instruments.