Retro Record Review

Dual portrait of Dufay and Binchois

Some things that I used to do fairly regularly that I do much less often is micro-reviews of pop music, little essays on music theory and "retro record reviews." The latter included things like a review of several recordings of the Bach Goldberg Variations on harpsichord, released over a few decades. I think the winner there was Trevor Pinnock, though Scott Ross came in very high. The reason for this was that I just got tired of all the fawning over the Glenn Gould recordings and thought these other folks should get some credit.

I like the idea of talking about recordings that may be decades old, but still have much to offer--probably more than current recordings which are the only ones that get reviewed these days. Though this may be changing as I suspect that we are entering a period in which no recordings get reviewed except for the occasional puff piece on the latest pop diva--which is rarely about the music.

So I'm going to review a nice box of recordings I just started listening to. I can't promise to offer anything like the depth of musicological expertise that the late Richard Taruskin brought to the table in his remarkable reviews of a variety of "early music" recordings (that actually extended up to Norrington's Beethoven). But I will do my best. Here is the recording:

First let's clear away some false assumptions: no, this is not some new and laudable record company (Warner Classics in this case) project to offer us a bargain box of "Josquin and the Franco-Flemish School"--34 CDs for $50, though that is what we get. The liner notes attribute the 2021 release to the 500th anniversary of the death of Joaquin. But the truth is that this is a heterogenous collection of recordings by various ensembles recorded over much of the history of early music in the 20th century from the early recording of Adrian Willaert by the Ensemble Vocal de Bruxelles in 1970 and the 1965 recording of Pierre de la Rue by the Capella Antiqua München to the Hilliard Ensemble's recording of the same composer in 1990 and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois recording of the named composer in 2000. Most of the recordings date from the 1980s by groups including the Hilliard Ensemble, the Early Music Consort of London and many others.

It goes without saying that the technical standards are good and many of the older recordings have been remastered so yes, you can go ahead and purchase the box in confidence. The problematic aspect, as Taruskin has observed in many places, is that the conceptual ideology of the performance practice has seen enormous development over those fifty years. But I will simply sidestep that and refer you to the relevant volume Text & Act by Taruskin.

What I will do is just offer my subjective reception on listening to the discs. Why did I purchase the box? I was just so sick of the never-ending articles on AI and music and the Taylor Swift tour that I felt the need for a real musical grounding and where better than the glorious music of the 15th and 16th centuries. The liner notes comment:

Architecture, sculpture, painting and music all benefited from Burgundian ambition and together disseminated a new vision of art throughout Europe as the continent moved into the era of humanism and the Renaissance. Henceforth, mankind would be seen as the peak of Divine Creation, and it was the duty of art to glorify both human intelligence and its application to the creative act, while also seeking to communicate with the greatest number of people--this led to the development of a new kind of polyphonic song designed for private practice and adapted to that purpose.

Particularly outstanding examples of the astonishing musical development of human intelligence are pieces like Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Duffy that mirrors structural aspects of the Florentine Duomo into the music and the Missa prolationum by Johannes Ockeghem that exhibits feats of meter and subdivision that I doubt have ever been surpassed.

But a lot of the discs contain secular song, a genre that has been around for millennia and is still around today--Thanks, Taylor! The first disc is devoted to chansons mostly in rondeau form by Gilles Binchois and is a fairly recent 1997 recording by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. To a modern listener the music is preternaturally calm, arriving at a cadence every ten to twenty seconds. These often sound rather angular to our ears due to the frequent use of the Landini cadence where the interval of a sixth falls to a fifth before opening out to an octave. The ensemble uses voices with instruments----the leader, Dominique Vellard is a lutenist as well as a singer and we hear a lot of lute accompaniments. The highlight is the setting of the fine poem of Christine de Pisan (1364-1430) Dueil angoisseus as a ballade. Courtly love is the main theme of the texts though they also include celebrations of nature and the return of spring.

Ending today with the recording of Dueil angoisseus which we can find on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_snuhaYa-J4

I will take up more of the discs in future posts.