Regis was undoubtedly amongst the most significant composers
of church music in the fifteenth century and was held in high
regard by his contemporaries. Until quite recently, however,
his music has been relatively neglected, before a flurry of publications
and conferences in recent years. A first complete recording of
his surviving works would, under pretty well any circumstances,
be something to welcome; when it is as well sung as this present
CD is, with a scholarly approach which in no way inhibits the
sheer beauty of the results, it deserves a particularly warm
welcome.
Little or nothing is known of Regis - sometimes referred to as
Jehan Leroy - before he is recorded in 1451 as Master of the
Choristers at the collegiate church of St Vincent, Soignies,
in the diocese of Cambrai. The church at Soignies was a place
of some musical importance and during the years between 1450
and 1460 Regis’s colleagues included the composers Gilles
de Binchois and Guillaume de Malbècque, both a generation
older than Regis. Regis evidently came to the attention of Guillaume
Dufay (b. c.1397), since he was invited to become master of the
choirboys at Cambrai, but he seems to have preferred to stay
at St Vincent, where in 1462 he was named scholasticus, a position
he held until his death.
It is perhaps of Dufay and Binchois that the listener is most
likely to think in listening to the music of Regis, sharing as
he does their fondness for the use of chanson or chanson-like
melodies in his religious works. Of Regis’s own chansons
only two seem to survive, and both are so good that that is a
cause for some sadness. ‘Puisque ma damme’ has a
moving dignity; as only rarely happens in such music one is actually
made to believe the implied speaker’s declaration:
Je m’en voy et mon cueur demeure:
Je chante et fay larmes de l’euil;
Je m’esbas et si n’ay que dueil;
Je ris, et mon euil pleaure.
(Though I leave, my heart remains;
Though I sing, tears fall from my eyes;
Though I seek distraction, I find only sadness;
Though I laugh, my eyes weep).
The more hopeful sentiments of ‘S’il vous plaist’ are
articulated in a brief, but texturally transparent setting of
beguiling beauty.
The greater body of Regis’s surviving work consists of
music written for the church. Two substantial masses survive.
The Missa L’homme armé was copied into the choirbook
of Cambrai Cathedral between 1462 and 1465, which has claims
to be the earliest recorded evidence of a ‘L’homme
armé’ mass - though Dufay and Ockeghem probably
preceded him in the use of this melody as the
cantus firmus for
a mass. This setting by Regis is particularly interesting for
the way its use of ‘L’homme armé’ is
combined with textual materials from the antiphon ‘Dum
sacrum mysterium’, an antiphon concerned with St Michael,
Protector of the Church Militant and leader of the heavenly armies
against Lucifer, so that the original secular song’s announcement
that “L'homme armé doibt on doubter” (the
armed man should be feared) effects an implicit warning to the
sinful. Musically the mass is striking for its use of canon and
for the way that each of the five sections is introduced by a
motto figure which has - as the Regis scholar Sean Gallagher
observes in his booklet notes - “a surprisingly ‘modern’ sound
in terms of its harmonies”. The other mass, the lengthy
Missa ancilla Domini, is evidently related to Dufay’s Missa
Ecce ancila Domini, both making use of the same unusual version
of the antiphon, and both making use of more than one cantus
firmus, still a relatively unusual procedure at this date. Another
fine work, graceful and harmonically inventive as well as moving
in its spirituality, Regis’s Missa ancilla Domini is also
memorable for the way in which, in the Credo, the words “vivos
et mortuos” are foregrounded in some extended sonorities
startlingly at odds with the rapidly changing polyphonic textures
all around them.
Regis’s motets seem to have attracted the greatest praise
and attention from his contemporaries. In part this was because
they were five-voice works at a time when music of more than
four voices was still uncommon. The resulting possibilities for
contrast and textual complexity give the music a distinctive
quality, though for all Regis’s obvious interest in such
matters he also displays a constant awareness of the significance
of the texts he is setting. The Christmas motet ‘O amirabile
commercium’, while vivacious and technically demanding
of its performers, also perfectly communicates the wonder and
excitement of its celebratory text, so that musical complexity
never becomes merely self-indulgent. The five-voice Ave Maria
is full of fascinating patterns of imitation between and across
voices, while the brief three-voice Ave Maria could, musically,
carry a text in praise of a secular beloved with no inappropriateness,
bringing us back to the influence of the chanson in a musical
reflection of that literary phenomenon of the time, in which
texts to beloved lady or to the Virgin Mary can be well-nigh
impossible to distinguish.
In short, this is a set which enables a reappraisal of an important,
fascinating and rewarding figure. The singing of The Clerks is
exemplary, in terms both of technical competence and alertness
to the texts, as well as in the sheer beauty and clarity of texture
they produce. The recording, made in the chapel of St. Catherine’s
College Cambridge - of which Edward Wickham is Director of Music
- is also a model of its kind. The presentation, in a sort of
mini-book, attractively illustrated and with full texts and translations
as well as a very useful essay by Sean Gallagher, leaves little
to be desired either … and you get a lovely Annunciation
by Roger van der Weyden on the front cover!
Glyn Pursglove
The Clerks (Carys Lane, Helen Neeves
(soprano), Lucy Ballard, Ruth Massey (alto), Tom Ruskin, Christopher Watson (tenor),
Jonathan Arnold, Robert MacDonald (bass))/Edward
Wickham (bass, director) 
