This modest project, Direct-to-Tape's Music of the Polish Renaissance, is helmed by a heavy hitter in early music;
Andrew Kirkman, erstwhile leader of the Binchois Consort.
Kirkman teaches at Rutgers, and leading the 16-voice Rutgers Collegium Musicum forms part of what would be for
Kirkman his "day job." As so much of the musical spoils of the renaissance are divvied up between Italian, English, and Franco-Flemish composers, one might be a little surprised to see that Poland also has a part to play in it. But after all, the Renaissance was also the age of Nicolaus Copernicus, who taught at Krakow University, not far from the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow -- pictured on the front cover -- where most of this music was first performed.
Featured composer Bartlomiej Pekiel lived long after the time of Copernicus, being the most prominent musician in Poland in the middle Baroque. Nevertheless, his music is only Baroque by virtue of the era in which it was written and is Renaissance in every other way; witness the mass entitled Missa pulcherrima ad instar Praenestini (Most Beautiful Mass in the Style of Palestrina). Beautiful it is; even as the texture is extremely busy and rich -- pulchritudinous, shall we say? -- there is something a little different in the handling of the Latin text of the mass here, particularly in comparison to Palestrina. Although the Missa pulcherrima is well known within Poland, as a whole, this music is practically unknown outside of its native land and much of it is rare. While Pekiel is well represented to posterity, given his 14 extant masses, a sizeable quantity of motets and more than 40 instrumental pieces, the remaining composers -- Waclaw Szamotul, Mikolaj Zielenski, and Marcin Leopolita -- have made a scant showing indeed, with a couple of these vocal pieces reconstructed from contemporary transcriptions for organ of lost vocal originals.
While the program is both highly intriguing and enjoyable, it is not perfect, or at least not quite up to the level of production typified by
Kirkman's other label, Hyperion. The Rutgers Collegium Musicum is a significant cut above the average collegiate choir, and there are definitely some fine voices in this organization; nevertheless, there is a noticeable -- none too distracting -- dislocation of pitch between the end of the Gloria and the beginning of the Credo in Pekiel's Missa pulcherrima. One assumes that Direct-to-Tape means analog tape, and the disc does have properties of analog warmth, though it is a little muddier than could be desired, probably owing to the slightly cramped acoustics of the collegiate chapel in which it was recorded. There's also a rough edit in the Credo, but to focus wholly on such details would be to miss the point of what makes this disc appealing. No one said singing these little known Polish Renaissance pieces would be easy, and they obviously aren't; were the shift in harmonic polarity to occur in a live performance, your ears would make up for the difference. Here,
Kirkman doesn't have the resources as he might have had at Hyperion, yet still delivers a quality recital of good, interesting, and rare repertoire that would be difficult to encounter elsewhere.