With this recording of Sacred Music of the Renaissance
the Australian vocal ensemble Cantillation, formed in 2001, has
thrown itself whole-heartedly into the area of thickest competition
for vocal groups singing renaissance repertoire. With the exception
of the 36 part Deo gratias of Ockeghem, all the repertoire
on this disc is well known and frequently recorded. Recording
this repertoire has positive and negative aspects. On the plus
side, it shows very quickly what the group is capable of achieving
in a way that makes comparison with other groups (and invariably
there will be comparison with the likes of The Tallis Scholars
or The Sixteen) straightforward. On the down side, one must ask
the obvious question "is yet another recording of this music
needed?"
The programme is well structured, but the choice
of repertoire is not imaginative. Allegri Miserere at the
beginning, Palestrina Stabat Mater in the middle and Tallis
Spem in alium at the end, relieved by the shorter but no less
ubiquitous Byrd Ave verum corpus, Victoria O magnum
mysterium and Lotti Crucifixus in between. Architecturally
this works well, but there are simply so many discs that distribute
this same programme in similar or slightly varied ways that the
purchaser is presented with a problem. They will either need to
have some connection with Australia to be interested in this particular
group of singers, or they are more likely to head for this programme
sung by groups with famous names.
Although Cantillation are a very good group and
the recording (of which more later) is generally excellent, they
have missed an opportunity to do something to make their performance
stand out from the crowd. The title work, Allegri’s famous Miserere
serves as a good example of this missed opportunity. To quote
from the extensive booklet notes "the two solo choirs were…famous
for their ability to embellish the melodic lines with elaborate
ornamentations. To have sung just the notes on the page would
have been unthinkable". The writer goes on: "in the
18th century the ability of …choristers to improvise
such decorations gradually diminished until it was lost entirely…"
but this is a misleading statement. The embellishments were never
improvised, they were taken from well-known figures that were
learnt as part of the art of singing. Books teaching this art
survive and are available again to modern researchers so the art
is not in fact "lost entirely". As the writer says,
to sing the mere notes on the page is unthinkable, and yet it
this is just what Cantillation does. Leaving aside the whole issue
of the fact that the notes on the page are not what Allegri wrote
(even the famous top C is a mistake caused by a 19th
century editor inadvertently transposing part of the music in
choir 1 up a forth) it is a shame to be still recording, without
recourse to modern scholarship, an incorrectly transcribed work
based on Charles Burney and Felix Mendelssohn’s recollections,
in an edition by Ivor Atkins dating from 1951. Nowadays we do
know how this music was sung. What a pity, given the frequency
with which it is recorded, that Cantillation could not have made
their version stand out by re-creating the embellishments as they
might have been applied by singers of Allegri’s own time.
There are other aspects of this disc that are
much more satisfying. Dufay’s famous motet Nuper rosarum flores
(written for the consecration of the dome of Florence Cathedral)
receives a very musical performance with a particularly good (although
uncredited) soprano who avoids going all "early music"
and boyish. Of course this would not have been sung by a woman
(nor by a boy) in Dufay’s time, but if the recording has a woman
singing it, she should at least be true to her own vocal sound
and exploit it to the service of the music. This she does and
the result is fine.
The same cannot be said for other tracks. Josquin’s
Ave Maria, the Stabat Mater of Palestrina and the
famous 8 part Crucifixus of Lotti all suffer from timidity
in the interpretation and a vocal sound that relies heavily on
received traditions descending from King’s College Cambridge and
The Tallis Scholars; both fine groups, but their sound is their
own. Cantillation need to find their own sound rather than relying
on these received traditions. These works need more colour, more
variety of balance and an altogether less refined sound. In the
Lotti, which is full of the most pungent dissonances, it must
be remembered that, although he was writing in a deliberately
archaic a cappella style, he was doing so at the same time
as Vivaldi was performing his La Stravaganza violin concertos.
The Venetian audience was used to the operatic and the dramatic
aspects of music being always at the forefront. Lotti was not
trying to be Byrd, but this aspect of the almost physically emotive
use of the dissonances seems to have passed Walker and his singers
by.
The disc is more impressive in the recording
of the works for massive forces. Unfortunately the booklet is
rather sniffy about the 40-voice motet Ecce beatam lucem
by Alessandro Striggio, which was probably the inspiration for
Tallis’s famous Spem in alium (and which is in fact a fine
work). This expression of subjective opinion about a work that
does not feature on the disc is a slip in the standard of the
booklet writing and should not have made it through the editing
process. The recording of 40 solo singers in one giant ensemble
is one of the great challenges for any engineer. The ABC team
have achieved excellent results here. It is too easy for such
a work to become a great wash of muddy sound, or to be handled
so dryly that ensemble and space are lost. The capture of this
performance steps neatly between these extremes and the clarity
is retained without sacrificing the grandeur of the big moments.
The same is almost achieved in the very interesting Deo gratias
of Ockeghem. This 36-part work (really the only ‘find’ in this
programme) is made up of four choirs of nine parts, each of which
is singing a (different) nine-fold canon. As a display of compositional
fireworks it is almost unrivalled and the listening experience
is certainly awe-inspiring. The difficulty lies in each choir
being of nine of the same voice type. A canon of nine basses is
always going to suffer from a certain cloudiness, but it is here
that the presence of added reverb really becomes noticeable and
is not necessarily a help.
Cantillation is clearly a group of very fine
singers, and one is possibly being somewhat hard on them. However,
when a group chooses to record repertoire available in many other
versions there has to be something extra to make them stand out
to the potential buyer. Apart from a very well captured Spem
in alium and an interesting piece of programming in the Deo
gratias there is not enough of stellar quality or noticeably
different approach to distinguish this (otherwise very capable)
performance from the crowd. It is a shame that a more imaginative
approach was not taken to the programming. Too much is aiming
only for beauty, and, while admirable, in this repertoire that’s
not enough.
Peter Wells
Cantillation dir.
Antony Walker