The second half of the British Viol ensemble Fretwork's debut for Harmonia Mundi is an effort of great discipline and loving critical attention to source material -- not to mention a specially commissioned set of Renaissance viols. The program on this CD is a showcase of song settings from the Offering of Polyphonic Chansons. This selection of works by Flemish, Italian, and French Renaissance composers was assembled by Ottaviani dei Petrucci, and became the first-ever printed collection of part-music. According to the liner notes, it is because of Petrucci and his method that anything at all about early 16th century salon music is known. Petrucci devised an exacting triple process for displaying and printing music -- stave, music, text -- that is still unsurpassed. Fretwork performs with their usual crucial restraint and painstaking attention to the obscure works of major composers such as Obrecht, Isaac, Josquin, Pinarol, Agricola, Caron, and many others. Their approach to the style of music is that of Petrucci, whose notations and methods offered the notion that the singer's requirements need not be uppermost in the scoring of a work for performance. Many composers began to use this model when writing for lute or other strings, but Fretwork plays the catalog here without deference that a human voice was ever scripted into the process at all. Despite the fact that many composers used the voice melody as a model for entrance into a work, Petrucci's scoring and printing offered the primacy of the written musical text and here, in the rondeauxs, "danses chansons," and waltzes, there appears an interplay among the ensemble that extrapolates the entirety of the early 1500s and grafts it onto the sparseness of contemporary time's needs. This music is timeless, the performances stellar, and the sound so exacting you'd swear you were in the room.
© Thom Jurek /TiVo