Pierre de la Rue, born around 1460, was a contemporary of Josquin Desprez and was nearly as highly regarded as that master in his own time. This disc presents one of his greatest works, a Requiem mass that was widely circulated and copied in the early sixteenth century, together with a Missa de beata virgine cut from similar cloth. In this beautiful recording, it's easy to hear why the Requiem (here designated "Missa pro defunctis," or mass for the dead) was so famous: it is full of varied textures, extremes of register, daring tonal coloring, and sensitivity to text of a sort usually associated with Josquin himself. Lengthy text passages such as the Psalm are set in limpid, hypnotic two-part polyphony, while the central thrusts of the mass rest somberly on pillars of homophonic music, way down low.
This recording will be of interest primarily to Renaissance enthusiasts and libraries, but really anyone who has just begun to listen to the Renaissance mass and has experienced it an undifferentiated flow of a cappella choral polyphony ought to check this out. The composer exploits a whole range of the musical options he had available, and what seems at first listen like textural uniformity turns out to be positively kaleidoscopic. Germany's
Ensemble Officium, a mixed choir with a clean yet highly expressive sound, performs the polyphonic sections of these masses complete with the Gregorian chant that would have originally surrounded them, and, in the Requiem especially, the listener can often follow the chant incipit of each section as the composer turns it into a long-note cantus firmus, sometimes in one voice and sometimes in another, in the music to follow.
The sound on this release from the Heidelberg, Germany-based Christophorus label has a bit of hiss but is never unpleasant. The presentation of these pieces as "Sacred Music at the Court of Frederick the Wise" in the liner notes is the only clinker here. While the information given may be of interest to specialists, it's of limited relevance for the general listener; Pierre de la Rue did not write this music for Frederick the Wise (1463-1525); rather, the Saxon court was but one of many places in northerly continental Europe where his music was popular (for the most part, he didn't follow the Netherlandish musical brain drain to Italy). Nor can two masses by one composer in any way offer even a sketch of a large body of court sacred music. This is a bit like issuing a disc of Nigerian popular music and filling it with
Dolly Parton songs, simply because she happens to have a strong following in that country. Fortunately, the notes also include some lovely reproductions of a German copy of a few passages of the music, which, performed this nicely, can speak for itself. Josquin addicts, take note: this disc will give you what you're looking for.