Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen

An important contribution to our understanding of the ‘gentle master musician.’ Stephen Rice brings perceptive musical insights to these accounts, and also sheds light on Févin’s idiom in the excellent CD booklet. His vocal ensemble may be slender but the singing is robust and buoyantly articulated. Boyish upper voices offset velvety tenors and basses, and the relatively close recording perspective produces a sound at once lucid and lustrous.

Pierre de la Rue is another of those composers who contributed so prolifically to the richness of musical life in the Low Countries during the late fifteenth century. If today he is less well known than some of his contemporaries, the distinguished advocacy of Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble should do much to redress the balance.

This disc presents a selection of works from the Chirk Castle part-books, a fascinating collection of devotional music from the Tudor period that remained hidden in the castle library for three hundred years.
The Chirk manuscripts contain works for unaccompanied voices as well as verse anthems and services, scored for solo voices, chorus and organ. This recording focuses on the unaccompanied items, presenting for the first time a selection of the ‘full’ services and anthems found in the manuscripts, including seven unique to the Chirk collection.

Morales was the first Spanish composer to achieve true international fame, and was described by contemporaries as ‘the light of Spain in music’. Although he is relatively well-represented in recordings, a few pieces have attracted the attention of performers at the expense of the majority of his output. This recording aims to begin filling that gap by presenting works which are so far underexposed, yet which are of extremely high quality.

Little is known about the life of the composer Pierre Moulu—he joins the long lists of Renaissance musicians whose lives are all but entirely masked in shadow. Fortunately a number of his works found favour with his contemporaries to the extent that they appear in numerous early manuscripts and prints, and they have attracted the attention of music historians since the earliest days of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. Like much of the large repertory of sixteenth-century polyphony, however, his works have rarely been performed in modern times, and this is the first recording devoted to his music.

This is The Brabant Ensemble’s third disc for Hyperion. Under their director, eminent musicologist Dr Stephen Rice, they continue to excavate jewels of the sixteenth-century choral repertoire which have until now remained under-performed and under-represented in music history. Their natural and instinctive performing style, which foregrounds the essential vocal qualities of this music, unlike the instrumental tone of other early music choirs, brings these beautiful and complex works abundantly to life.

Like many of even the most prolific and celebrated composers of the sixteenth century, Jacobus Clemens non Papa (‘not the Pope’) has offered the history books little factual material with which to work. In contrast to the paucity of biographical material, however, many sources of Clemens' music survive. Indeed, he is one of the most widely published musicians of the entire century with fifteen Masses, over two hundred motets, many Dutch psalms and French chansons to his name.

Biographical and musicological certainties may be in short supply in the life and work of Josquin, but there's no gainsaying the magnificence of the music. This program of shorter works, from The Brabant Ensemble and Stephen Rice, most in unusual guise, celebrates his 500th anniversary.

Mining the rich musical seam of the Low Countries, Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble have once again unearthed sixteenth-century treasure in the works of Lupus Hellinck and Johannes Lupi.

The young Oxford choir turns its immaculate ensemble, lucid diction and faultless tuning to an exciting find: a hugely neglected composer from the 16th century. Relatively little is known about Dominique Phinot’s life—there is a suggestion that he was executed for homosexual practices, cutting short a productive and impressive composing career. Phinot’s output consists of over a hundred motets, two Masses, and settings of Vesper Psalms and the Magnificat, as well as two books of French chansons and two Italian madrigals.