The recordings of the
Chamber Choir of Namur and the instrumental ensemble
La Fenice, under leader
Jean Tubéry, may not be riding high on the classical sales charts, but they are most enthusiastically recommended. This series, from Belgium's Ricercar label, spares no expense in the graphics or the engineering, and what you get for the money are superior recordings of the hard-to-handle early polychoral style. This repertory is known to general listeners mostly through the music of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli and their German stylistic descendants, but their ideas combined with existing styles in many different ways as they spread across Europe over a period of several decades. This recording and others by this group give listeners an idea of the music that arose when Renaissance courts wanted to pull out all the stops. This double-CD set features music by Netherlandish composers active on the Iberian peninsula, a generation apart in time. No event called for more stop-pulling than a royal wedding, and Philippe Rogier, who became music master of Philip II of Spain in 1588, composed the six-part Missa Domine Dominus Noster for the marriage of Philip's daughter to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, three years before that. Perhaps the music got him the job. Both masses in this package feature reconstructions of an actual celebration of the mass from the time, with the Ordinary sections interspersed with psalms, motets, instrumental substitions for parts of the mass, and plainchant. What's particularly interesting about this work is that Rogier composed much of this linking material, as well; the music hangs on contrasts between the full polychoral style and more conservative polyphonic idioms from the North. The contrasts are even more striking in the Missae bonae voluntatis by Portuguese composer Mateo Romero, whose birth name, in Liège, was Matthieu Romarin. Many of his works were destroyed in a fire and subsequent earthquake in the eighteenth century, and not enough survived to permit a reconstruction similar to what has been accomplished with the Rogier work. However, the mass is interesting enough in itself. This work, too, is for three "choirs," but one of them consists merely of a solo voice, with continuo, adding a complexity of antiphonal effects. All of the action is backed by
La Fenice, a group of brass-and-continuo players led by
Tubéry, himself a player of Baroque cornets and trombones, and the balance with the medium-sized choral forces is carefully sculpted. The two recordings were made six years apart, in different churches, and the later one (of the Romero work) is a bit clearer. This seems to be a budget release, with notes simply stacked one on the other. It made a great deal of sense, however, to put these works together, and this set would make a great starting point for anyone who has ever noticed these remarkable recordings and been tempted by them.