Josquin 500
Pie memorie: A valediction in voices and viols
Linarol Consort, Binchois Consort, Andrew Kirkman
Recorded in Leominster Priory. Available online until 31 October 2021
The Linarol Consort’s Josquin 500 festival, marking the 500th anniversary of Josquin des Prez’s death, is taking place during August and September 2021 with a series of live and streamed events. There are several options for booking online access to the events. The first of these events was Pie memorie: “A valediction in voices and viols” with The Linarol Consort & The Binchois Consort, recorded at a live concert in Leominster Priory on 20 August 2021 and available online from 27 August, the anniversary of Josquin’s death, until 31 October 2021. The premise for this concert was to imagine Josquin’s friends, colleagues and admirers coming together to pay their funeral respects in a house near the church of Condé sur Escaut. Viols and voices join in songs and motets of lamentation, including Richafort’s Requiem, as they hoped to aid Josquin’s soul’s route to salvation.
The Renaissance Singers have a history that goes back to 1944. They played an important part in the revival of interest in Renaissance sacred polyphony as the early music movement grew and developed. Their 2017 Christmas concert, in the architecturally important Hawksmoor church of St George’s Bloomsbury, sensibly avoided carols and concentrated on what they do best: singing Renaissance music. Under the inspired direction of their musical director, David Allinson, they presented a programme of seasonal music centered on the composer Clemens non Papa and his Missa Pastores quidnam vidistis, together with music by Josquin, Verdelot, Gombert and Willaert.
The Tallis Scholars add to their list of ten CDs of Josquin Masses with this recording of two fascinating, if slightly curious examples. Neither of them are definitively acknowledged to be by Josquin. But if they are, as Peter Phillips argues in his programme note, they are likely to be early works, the Missa Di dadi perhaps being a precursor of the later Missa Pange lingua. And they are both fascinating pieces, not just for the music but for the background to their composition. As their titles suggest they involve gambling, the throw of the dice, and the seduction of a young lady from Biscay.
Magnificat vocal ensemble celebrate their 25th anniversary with this CD of extraordinarily powerful large-scale polyphonic works by Renaissance masters, all influenced by the equally extraordinary Italian Dominican friar and prophet, Girolamo Savonarola. His rather alarming prophesies (including declaring Florence to be the ‘New Jerusalem’, the destruction of all things secular, and a biblical flood), his denouncement of the Medicis, clerical corruption, and the exploitation of the poor, together with his extreme puritanical views (resulting in the Bonfire of the Vanities) led, not surprisingly, to his getting himself caught up in Italian and Papal politics.
Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews + 