Recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in 1999 and not particularly well engineered, this album was reissued late in the 2000s decade by the Dutch budget label Brilliant. The original release dated from just before Britain's
Orlando Consort, a male quartet here augmented with a couple of other singers, went on to wide popularity with a series of themed albums, both sacred and secular, that brought together varied strands of Renaissance music in highly listenable ways. Here the group plays it straight, plowing through 16
Josquin motets and hitting several of the greatest hits in the process. There's no real reason to sing these motets with one voice per part as is done here;
Josquin was involved for most of life with choirs of boys and men, including the
Sistine Chapel Choir, that clearly had more than one singer on each line. A group like
the Tallis Scholars offers a better choice for a basic
Josquin motet album. But the
Orlando's high level of musicianship, combining both technical accuracy and expression, is everywhere in evidence here.
Josquin's uncanny way of extracting distinctive polyphonic structures from the simplest of materials at the beginning of a piece is traced with perfect clarity, while the expressive dimension of a piece like De profundis clamavi (track 3), with the first-person "voice" gaining power as it climbs out of the depths all the while staying within the confines of a strict canon, is beautifully done. An alternative way of performing
Josquin, but one that will be appreciated by those who favor a subjective approach to his motets. Concise booklet notes are in English only.