Huelgas

Just how engaging, catchy, lively, and artful can 13th century Spanish music be? Very, as evidenced by this collection of motets, conductus, mass movements, and strophic songs from the legendary manuscript compiled at the 12th-century Cistercian convent at Las Huelgas. This remarkable program, highlighting only a handful of the nearly 200 works contained in the original manuscript, shows not only the beauty and inventiveness of sacred music of this period, but also how colorful and varied it could be.

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."

Auf »The Landscape of the Polyphonists« präsentieren das Huelgas Ensemble und Paul Van Nevel auf zwei fantastischen CDs den intensiven melancholischen und imitatorischen Stil der französisch-flämischen polyphonen Musik und erkunden, wie die Musik durch den besonderen Charakter der Landschaft, in der jeder Komponist sein Leben verbrachte, geprägt wurde. 24 ausgewählte Landschaftsaufnahmen und Bilder von flämischen Kathedralen und ihrer Umgebung versetzen den Zuhörer in die Welt der flämischen Länder der Renaissance, während das Huelgas Ensemble die Werke von außergewöhnlichen Komponisten wie Antoine Busnois, Nicholas Gombert, Josquin Desprez sowie von weniger bekannten, aber ebenso bemerkenswerten Komponisten wie Josquin Baston, Jean l’Héritier oder Jean Mouton aufführt. Das Publikum kann die komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen historischen Landschaften, Architektur und Musik an ihren jeweiligen Herkunftsorten unmittelbar erleben.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).