Pal Benko

Agricola - Missa Malheur me bat, Missa In minen sin - A:N:S Chorus & János Bali (2001) {Hungaroton Classic HCD32011}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 348 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 185 Mb
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© 2001 Hungaroton Classic | HCD 32011
Classical / Renaissance / Sacred / Early Music

First recording. .. or the more colloquial "s__t happens" is as good a translation of the phrase "malheur me bat" as any. It's the title of a chanson of the late 15th Century. The rest of the text hasn't survived. We can assume that the chanson was a love lament, but not with any certainty; it might have been a general statement of the woes of mortality. Written in the Phrygian mode (E to e with no flats of sharps), it does have a melodically woeful cast. Polyphony in the Phrygian mode was not unusual, but it always involved the compositional difficulty of avoiding the "tritone" (the interval from F-natural to B-natural), so that raising the F or lowering the B (a practice we call ficta) often disguises the modal quality of the music.