Lovers of Clément Janequin's programmatic sixteenth century French chansons have been waiting a long time for a recording that does them justice, and this is it -- for fluent French speakers. The celebrated French countertenor Dominique Visse and his Ensemble Clément Janequin deliver crisply elegant, restrained versions of these polyphonic songs, ...
With this disc, Harmonia Mundi's Century: A History of Music series moves onto what sports fans might call its home field: the Harmonia Mundi catalog is heavily stocked with discs by artists who have brought the music of the seventeenth century to life, and several of them, notably Les Arts Florissants and its Buffalo-to-Paris-transplanted leader ...
Of course, composers during the early Renaissance period wrote profane music. With the rediscovery of the beauties of the pagan past paid for by princes with deep pockets, what else could they compose? Ethereal masses and motets were so late Medieval. Besides, Europeans had rediscovered more than merely the beauties of the pagan past; they had ...
This three-CD set from Harmonia Mundi purports on the packaging to offer "the finest masses in musical history." Of course that's an impossible goal, and the liner notes back off from it with various disclaimers. The question to ask about a set like this, assembled from existing Harmonia Mundi releases going back to 1986, is whether it either ...
"Paschal de L'Estocart," one sees on the cover of this disc. "Octonaires de la vanité du monde." The average listener will be mystified, and the booklet isn't much help -- it seems obsessed with locating L'Estocart on the Protestant-Catholic continuum (little is known about the composer, anyhow) rather than telling us what the music is like. ...
As with the other discs of vocal music in Harmonia Mundi's Century: A History of Music series, it's a shame that this one includes no song texts. For the newcomer, at whom such a series is presumably aimed, there's no better anchor than knowing what the performers are singing about. But for that, this disc offers a nearly ideal introduction to the ...
The Missa Et ecce terrae motus of Antoine Brumel represents something of a black belt for choirs specializing in music of the High Renaissance -- until Tallis' motet Spem in alium came along, this 12-voice mass was the most grandly conceived work of Renaissance choral music, with a great variety of textures deployed in service of an especially ...
Josquin's Missa Pange Lingua, composed around 1515 near the end of the composer's long life, is rightly considered one of the greatest monuments of Renaissance music. With a dark palette generated by its use of the Phrygian mode (the notes corresponding to a scale played on the white keys of a piano starting with E) and a deeply expressive style ...
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