ISAAC Ich muss dich lassen - Ricercae RIC318 [MS]: Classical Music Reviews

This is a typically robust, lively and extrovert hour or so from the vivacious yet sensitive Capilla Flamenca with Oltremontano. The director (and bass) Dirk Snellings explores the still too shady and overlooked world of Heinrich Isaac. Isaac was born some time around 1450 in the Low Countries. There he clearly wrote music of significance early on. He served at the court of Innsbruck; later in Augsburg and Florence. A move to Vienna saw him become the first European musician known for certain to have been employed exclusively to compose music.

The purpose of this excellent, compelling and varied CD is to illustrate the breadth of Isaac's output. It succeeds well. In addition to unaccompanied songs and motets in all the languages used by Isaac, there are instrumental and sung pieces with instruments. The players are drawn from the dozen plus members of the two ensembles, Capilla Flamenca and Oltremontano - both formally founded in 1993.

There’s a dearth of recordings by the nevertheless significant and influential Isaac. Almost unbelievably, there are only three CDs in the current catalogue devoted entirely to the composer! It would have been all too easy against this backdrop to jump in to make this offering either too overtly an exercise in advocacy, rather too spectacularly attractive, or in some other way a superficial taster. This would have done no-one any good.

Instead Snelling exercises as much control and reserve in the style of his direction and interpretation as enthusiasm. He lets the music make its own case - rather, one assumes, as must those who performed it in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries have done. Take the striking La mi la sol [tr.14] for brass. It's as measured as it is a piece to call us to attention. It's brief. Yet it encapsulates a world of emotions … stateliness, control, detachment. Immediately following comes Ich stund an einem Morgen, the longest work on the CD. It is also attributed jointly to Ludwig Senfl (1486-1542 or 1543), Isaac's famous pupil. Equally impressive is the song from which the CD's title was taken, Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen [tr.18]. This is a tapestry of plaintive reflection on what it means to leave a place one loves; and - by extension - what it means to leave the kind of life one has lived. Capilla Flamenca and Oltremontano bring out and offer gently every ounce of compression, condensed emotion and distillation in the harmonies and melodic insistence. Yet they do not dwell on the composer's sensitivity to such feelings nor do they overstate the case for him. At the same time they fail to underplay the emotion by steering away from it.

Indeed, the alternation of vocal, unaccompanied, accompanied and instrumental pieces enhances the freshness which Isaac's music otherwise has in abundance. It's nevertheless music that - in keeping with the traditions of Flanders - is concentrated, weighty and never flippant. I say this for all the joy and even exuberance which it at times exhibits. Las rauschen [tr.15], for example, actually a song for four voices, is offered here in a delicate and sensitive arrangement for instruments alone.

The acoustic is close, warm yet not overbearing throughout. It suits the style of the singers and players well. The booklet is highly informative and contains all the texts in the original languages only. Even if it weren't for the absence of recordings of a good half of the works available here - some others are well known and do have rival recordings - usually as part of compilations, though - this would be a CD to buy immediately. It's idiomatic, its interpretations are perceptive and the performers' technique is high.

Lovers of Renaissance music can't afford to miss this CD from the ever-enterprising Ricercar; specialists in Isaac likewise. As an example of top-notch sensitivity in honouring a major composer without making a fetish of it, this is a CD to go for.

Mark Sealey

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