Stephen Leather The Strech

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.

The Masses in C, K317 and 337, which date from 1779 and 1780 respectively, are the last of Mozart's 15 Salzburg Masses, ten of which are in this key. Both are short (26 minutes and 23 minutes, respectively), in compliance with the Archbishop of Salzburg's rule that no Mass, including the Epistle Sonata and the Offertory or Motet, should last longer than three quarters of an hour. The earlier of the two, K317, is well known (perhaps because it has a convenient nickname, probably referring to its use at an annual service held since 1751 in commemoration of the miraculous crowning of an image of the Virgin in the pilgrimage church of Maria-Plain near Salzburg) and has been recorded many times, whereas K337 is virtually unknown, though musically no less interesting.

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.

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.

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.

Jean Mouton was a Renaissance French composer and choirmaster, much acknowledged but more rarely recorded, who wrote a body of music that’s both technically inventive and immediately appealing. Here Stephen Rice and The Brabant Ensemble—renowned exponents of sixteenth-century Franco-Flemish repertoire—perform all Mouton’s eight-part music, two four-part motets, and his only five-part Mass setting, the Missa Tu es Petrus. The latter is characterized by light, clear textures and a soaring cantus firmus, while the double-choir Nesciens mater is rightly famous for its ingenious canon. Sheer compositional skill aside, all these works demonstrate Mouton’s vivid and original imagination—one that has the ability to speak directly to our time.

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.

The Chinaman understood death. Jungle-skilled, silent and lethal, he had killed for the Viet Cong and then for the Americans. He had watched helpless when his two eldest daughters had been raped and killed by Thai pirates. Now all that was behind him. Quiet, hard-working and unassuming, he was building up his South London take-away business. Until the day his wife and youngest daughter were destroyed by an IRA bomb in a Knightsbridge department store. …

While most classical composers attempt to spread around their artistry among various mediums, Stephen Scott has put all of his eggs into the proverbial one basket, specializing in bowed piano music as founder/leader of the Bowed Piano Ensemble, est. 1977. This is not as limited a resource as it sounds; in 1930, Henry Cowell stated he had discovered 165 ways to play the inside of a piano, though if he made a list of all those methods no one has been able to find it. Moreover, Stephen Scott doesn't seem to mind being regarded as "the Bowed Piano Guy." New Albion's The Deep Spaces is his sixth bowed piano CD and demonstrates some measure of stepping out of the box on Scott's part; The Deep Spaces is a song cycle, set to poems by Shelley, Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Pliny, and Pablo Medina and sung by soprano Victoria Hansen.