Sound Recording Reviews

For information about the scope of this column, consult the headnote in the September 2004 issue (p. 206 of this volume).

Clément Janequin. Chansons elégiaques et pittoresques. Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal/Gilbert Patenaude. Analekta FL 2 3184, 2004.

Very little is known of the early life of Clément Janequin. It is generally believed, though it has not been conclusively established, that he was born in Châtellerault; his exact birth date is a matter of speculation (probably during the 1480s), and while his compositional style owes a clear debt to Josquin Desprez, there is little reason to believe he ever studied with the Flemish master. (Even less is known of his dotage and death—in fact, the place and date of his death have never been determined.) We know that he became a priest in his twenties and was engaged as a composer by a series of churches and municipalities, and that his published chansons were attracting attention across Europe by the early 1530s. During the early years of that decade he served as master of the children's choir at Auch Cathedral, and it is during this period that the first volumes of his chansons began to be published in France. It seems unlikely that the choir he worked with at Auch numbered anywhere near the 180 voices of today's Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal (just under 70 of whom were used for this recording), but the ensemble's sound must have been similar to this in its richness and purity of tone. The Petits Chanteurs are not the most perfectly polished boys choir in the world, but they offer engaging interpretations of such charmingly idiosyncratic pieces as the programmatic chansons La guerre and Le chant des oyseaulx, and deliver the plaintive Doulens regretz, ennuys, souspirs with appropriate gravity. The performance is acceptably well recorded.

Orlando di Lasso. Il canzoniere de Messer Francesco Petrarca. Huelgas-Ensemble/Paul Van Nevel. Harmonia Mundi HMC 901828, 2004.

Orlando di Lasso was one of many sixteenth-century composers to fall under the spell of the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, whose collection of 366 poems (written, it is generally believed, in honor of Laura de Noves, wife of Hugo de Sade) inspired madrigalists across Europe. All of Petrarch's poems were eventually set to music by one composer or another, and Lasso himself set more than sixty of them over the course of his long madrigal writing career. Since it is difficult to imagine Lasso's settings receiving more sympathetic and technically assured interpretations than those presented here by the Huelgas-Ensemble under Paul Van Nevel, one can only hope that the group will eventually record all of them. For now, however, we must be satisfied with only these ten selections. The ensemble's eight voices blend beautifully, and the singers' intonation is excellent, but what stands out in these performances is the degree to which the warmth and tenderness of their delivery matches those qualities in Petrarch's texts and in Lasso's exquisitely complementary musical gestures. In the five-voice setting Mia benigna fortuna, the singers trip lightly and with great rhythmic flexibility through the opening lines, slowing eventually to a dark pensiveness as the lyric turns despairing in the second half; the equally introspective Io son sì stanco sotto is given a more regular but no less heartfelt reading. The Eglise Saint-Sylvain à Saint-Sauvant in Saintonge provides the ideal acoustic for this recording, a perfect balance between reverberant richness and warm intimacy. Very strongly recommended to all collections.

William Byrd. Playing Elizabeth's Tune: The Tallis Scholars Sing William Byrd. Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips. Gimell GIMDN 902, 2004.

[Column editor's note: This column does not normally include reviews of video titles, but an exception is being made in this case; the release under consideration is a hybrid video/audio product and will be of particular interest to academic sound recording collections.]

This DVD consists of three parts. The first is a filmed performance by the Tallis...