Josquin Capella

A year or so ago my wife and I were standing on Juliet’s balcony in Verona, a romantic spot. Below us there assembled a mixed choir which started to sing one of the most famous madrigals of the 16th century, Il bianco e dolce cigno by Jacques Arcadelt. Apparently all Italians know this music, almost from memory, as do I, so I joined in, much to the delight of all those in the little courtyard below. There is more to Arcadelt than this or any of his over one hundred other published madrigals. His church music helped to lay the foundations for Palestrina and his contemporaries yet has been sadly neglected.

When musicological research fails from the outset because it finds the deed but not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator, then we have to surrender completely to the listening experience and forget the unknowns. This is also the case with Missa solennis, which a certain Ioannes Cuisean composed for the people of Cologne as commissioned for the Feast of St. Gereon in 1663. Did the composer have something to do with the Strasbourg Cathedral because the only copy of the work survived there? No one knows. This has motivated the Cologne-based Josquin Capella, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to make a grand event of this piece, which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful. Framed and interspersed with organ pieces by his – anything but unknown – contemporary Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), a liturgy of magnificent sound is created with no need for further "research".

When musicological research fails from the outset because it finds the deed but not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator, then we have to surrender completely to the listening experience and forget the unknowns. This is also the case with Missa solennis, which a certain Ioannes Cuisean composed for the people of Cologne as commissioned for the Feast of St. Gereon in 1663. Did the composer have something to do with the Strasbourg Cathedral because the only copy of the work survived there? No one knows. This has motivated the Cologne-based Josquin Capella, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to make a grand event of this piece, which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful. Framed and interspersed with organ pieces by his – anything but unknown – contemporary Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), a liturgy of magnificent sound is created with no need for further "research".

When musicological research fails from the outset because it finds the deed but not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator, then we have to surrender completely to the listening experience and forget the unknowns. This is also the case with Missa solennis, which a certain Ioannes Cuisean composed for the people of Cologne as commissioned for the Feast of St. Gereon in 1663. Did the composer have something to do with the Strasbourg Cathedral because the only copy of the work survived there? No one knows. This has motivated the Cologne-based Josquin Capella, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2024, to make a grand event of this piece, which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful. Framed and interspersed with organ pieces by his – anything but unknown – contemporary Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667), a liturgy of magnificent sound is created with no need for further "research".

Although the works of Josquin DesPrez (cl440-1521) are better known today than those of any other fifteenth-century composer, his biography remains shrouded in uncertainties. The general outlines –- his birth in the area of northern France that produced so many composers of the day, his travel to Milan, Rome and Ferrara, and then his return to the north at the end of his life - are clear. But, his connections to the Court of France, to the Provençal court of King René, to the court in Hungary, and many other details about his life remain contested or simply unknowable.

This disc of Iberian and Latin American Renaissance music is a reissue cleverly disguised as a new release. It compiles music from several recordings by Catalonian visionary Jordi Savall, his luminous-voiced collaborator Montserrat Figueras, and his Hesperion XXI and Capella Reial de Catalunya ensembles, dressing them up with a new set of rather philosophical booklet notes on themes of change, of intercultural tolerance, and of the evolving nature of Christianity in the Iberian realm and in New Spain. Some might call this a cynical ploy, but actually Savall has always been moving in a circle, so to speak, spiraling inward toward a deeper musical understanding of the historical themes touched on here: the lingering effects of the legacy of medieval Iberia and its "mestissage" or mixture of cultures, the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles (Carlos) V (did you know that he was both the first monarch to be called "His Majesty" and the first to be honored with the claim that the "sun never set" on his empire?), and the relationships between cultivated and popular styles, both in Iberia and the New World.

It's always great to encounter the recording that can "crack" a composer open, making his or her music accessible to a general listening public. And it's all the better when such a recording comes from beyond the usual quarters, as, for example, with this American recording of Renaissance polyphony. Nicolas Gombert was a Flemish Renaissance composer, a successor (and possibly a student) of Josquin who entered the service of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His music, especially in his masses, tends to present itself as a dense, unbroken flow of polyphony. Gombert is one of the composers music history students tend to slog through in hopes of getting to the good stuff. One noted Renaissance scholar used to refer to him, Adrian Willaert, and Giaches de Wert as "the Ert brothers." All that could change with this disc of Gombert motets and chansons. These works are less dense than his masses, but not by much, and they are considerably less limpid than Josquin's pieces in the same genres. But here it is the performances that clarify them. The Massachusetts ensemble Capella Alamire (the name is a pun on an aspect of an old solmization system) under director Peter Urquhart, recording in a church in Portsmouth, NH, slows the motets down slightly and addresses them with a group of eight singers – the black belt of choral singing.

August 27th marks the 500th anniversary of Josquin’s passing, an outstanding musical personality celebrated throughout the entire Western world for his immeasurable genius. If Josquin excelled in all genres, it is maybe in the free form of the motet that he gave the best of his art, for instance the beautiful Stabat Mater. This album by the Capella Antiqua München, newly digitized and remastered in high resolution, reveals all the splendor of these pages, among the most beautiful of sacred music’s history.