Salve, Salve, Salve
Josquin’s Spanish Legacy
Contrapunctus, Owen Rees
Signum SIGCD608. 71’02
Cristóbal de Morales: Jubilate Deo omnis terra
Tomás Luis de Victoria: Missa Gaudeamus, Salve regina
Francisco Guerrero:Ave virgo sanctissima, Surge propera, amica mea
Josquin Desprez: Salve regina
Some of the most interesting recordings and performances of early music in the UK over the past decades has come from (generally Oxbridge) scholars whose academic research interests led them into (or kept them in) academia, many achieving high academic office. One such is Owen Rees, like many such, a former Oxbridge organ scholar. He is now Professor of Music at Oxford University and Fellow and Director of Music at The Queen’s College. His research interests are Iberian and English vocal music of the Renaissance, and his professional vocal group Contrapunctus allows this research to be presented to a wider musical audience. Their latest recording explores the influence of Josquin Desprez on Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria, the rather disparate composers united by their use of ostinato (the repetition of a motif throughout a piece), a technique inspired by Josquin.
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.