JOSQUIN, BAULDEWEYN. Missa Mater Patris, Missa Da pacem — The Tallis Scholars
[3.11.2019]
gimell.com
Gimell CDGIM 052
There is so much that is fine about this recording, i.e. everything, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Best perhaps with the pieces themselves. The Missa Mater Patris by
Josquin Des Pres – if indeed it be by him – is an astounding creation.
Written in four parts, with a fifth added for the third Agnus Dei, it is
unique among his masses in referring to a work by another composer,
Antoine Brumel, who was seemingly only a decade younger than Josquin.
Because it is unique among Josquin’s masses, both in provenance and in
musical style, it is inevitable that the revisionist police come
sniffing round, eager to remove it from Josquin’s canon. Scarcely less
impressive, the Missa Da pacem survives with attributions to
Mouton, Josquin and Bauldeweyn in early sources, and throughout the
nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries it was hailed as one of
Josquin’s greatest compositions. Then in 1972, according to Peter
Phillips’s cogent notes, Edgar Sparks established that it was the work
of Noel Bauldeweyn, who flourished during Josquin’s lifetime. There is a
commercial recording of four of his masses by the excruciatingly named
but capable Beauty Farm, an ensemble based in Austria, on Fra Bernardo
FB1709761, a double album.
What of the music itself? Mater Patris, the euphonious three-part motet by Brumel on which the Missa Mater Patris is
based, is constructed largely of duets followed by short passages in
all three parts. Josquin’s fuller punctuations tend to be homophonic,
with harmonies and textures that glow gloriously, a quality that sets it
apart from his earlier more polyphonic masses. Particularly memorable –
one wants to say catchy but the context might be too serious – is his
response to the word Hosanna and, while Brumel’s setting of the word
“exaudi” lurks throughout the mass, here Josquin gives it full rein.
Peter Phillips’s notes are excellent and, although I would take with a
pinch of salt his suggestion that Josquin’s setting of Hosanna exhibits
playfulness, it certainly shows a human side to this most technically
assured of composers. While still showing maximum homage to Brumel,
Josquin flexes his polyphonic muscles towards the end of the third Agnus
in five parts, resulting in music emulated at the same point only by
Palestrina and, particularly, Byrd. One corker of a dissonance at 4’05
left this listener breathless.
Missa Da pacem also in four parts, based on the plainchant
“Da pacem, Domine”, is eminently fit to be mentioned in the same
sentence as Josquin even though it has been established as a work of
Bauldeweyn. Besides those fine passages (especially the fabulous third
Agnus in six parts) mentioned in his notes by PP, the first Kyrie,
Benedictus and first Agnus in particular present the work of a composer
who, at his best, is comparable in stature to Josquin as, say, Alonso
Lobo is to Victoria.
Recently I attended a concert by The Tallis Scholars under Peter
Phillips at the Cadogan Hall in London, at which they performed
Palestrina’s neglected but superb Missa Ave Maria a6, plus motets by Byrd (including his disorientatingly discordant six-part setting of O salutaris hostia described
amusingly but accurately in the programme notes as “bonkers”), Handl,
Morales and Palestrina again, with a neglected Magnificat by him to
conclude. Their live singing was as good as I have ever heard it, and
the same can be said about their recorded singing on this disc. They
present the best possible case for these two masses, supported by
outstanding sound engineering in which every part is equally audible and
perfectly balanced.
Even after all this exhaustive advocacy I am still not sure that I
have done this superlative disc adequate justice. Suffice to say,
everything about it is the best.
Richard Turbet
earlymusicreview.com
The graphics for this Tallis Scholars release mention scholarly disagreement over the Missa Mater Patris, long attributed to Josquin but "recently shown to be by the little-known Noel Bauldeweyn," writes director Peter Phillips. "Or is it?" he adds.
He sketches out the controversy, pointing out that the mass does not resemble any of Josquin's other compositions in the genre; he doesn't answer his question. However, you might take the album as a rejoinder to those questioning the authenticity of the mass. Its possible removal from the Josquin canon rests entirely on this musical evidence, so Phillips is entitled to adduce musical evidence of his own: the genuine Bauldeweyn mass included here sounds nothing like Josquin but is basically a work in 15th century style with a bit of imitative counterpoint thrown in.
The Missa Mater Patris is a spectacular work, whoever wrote it. It does include long homophonic passages that were uncharacteristic of Josquin's time and the rest of his output (although apparently not very characteristic of Bauldeweyn, either). Thus, Josquin inflects his borrowed material, a motet by Brumel, in the directions of both simplicity and, at the end, the usual complexity.
Without taking an explicit position, Phillips admits that some parts of the Bauldeweyn Missa da Pacem are pretty dull, and he speculates that the parts that aren't might have been written by Josquin. The Missa Mater Patris is at its most Josquin-typical in the Incarnatus and Crucifixus, which introduce a new tonal realm in a way that probably no other Renaissance composer was capable of.
Whatever your ideas when it comes to the do-it-yourself musicology, the reading by the always strong Tallis Scholars is especially sensitive here, and Gimell's sound from the Chapel at Merton College is superb. Highly recommended, both simply for its pleasures and as a way to introduce the kinds of issues scholars of Renaissance music think about.
allmusic.com
[3.11.2019]
medieval.org Remarks
http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/remarks.html
19 November 2019
Todd M. McComb
———
The new album in the Tallis Scholars'
Josquin cycle actually begins with Brumel — to recall the
previous entry — & indeed a similarly "danceable"
& motivic piece in Mater Patris: Their performance of
this short motet is less lively or taut than those by Musica Secreta,
but it does set the stage for a quality performance of Josquin's
parody mass on this piece.
I'd actually forgotten about the Missa
Mater Patris, since I'd long ago accepted suggestions that it
was stylistically incongruous, and thus not by Josquin. However,
more recently, e.g. in considerations around the
Missa Quem dicunt homines, I've
come to realize & appreciate (i.e. believe) that incongruity
could actually define much of Josquin's late mass writing, in that
experimenting with different styles apparently appealed to him.
Peter Phillips actually spends very little time making an argument
that the mass is by Josquin, merely noting that some had suggested
otherwise, and indeed, who else might have written this?
That said,
it's also completely different from so much of his music, taking
the repetitive motivic style to an extreme, or as Phillips says,
"paring down a highly developed method." I can't say as
I really enjoy the result, but it's distinctive — & that
much more severe than what Brumel himself undertook. (One might
analogize the sacred austerity of Missa Pange lingua, a cycle
that could really use an updated interpretation, to a sort of
"secular austerity" in Missa Mater Patris, with
their differing configurations of simplicity....)
Phillips goes
on to make more curious remarks about the paired Missa Da
pacem, as having been attributed to Bauldeweyn (after a history
of being admired as a work by Josquin), even suggesting that perhaps
the cycle is a dual composition because, while some of the passages
are not very interesting (to Phillips anyway), some are just too
good to be by Bauldeweyn! I find this to be an outrageous suggestion,
as if Bauldeweyn was simply incapable of writing good music (which
I'd very much dispute based on the revelatory Beauty
Farm double album that I continue to hear often), but also as
if Josquin basically defines good music for the period.
I suppose
that the latter is a historical position, but also seems like patent
nonsense that Phillips ought to be able to resist... I guess he's
fallen under the spell of deification. (Or perhaps the suggestion
is actually whimsical, simply a way to argue for continuing attention
to the piece?) Anyway, the Missa Da pacem is definitely
more directly enjoyable for me, although not as appealing as some
of Bauldeweyn's other settings.
Both interpretations are well done,
especially (perhaps ironically) the second, as the Tallis Scholars
continue to improve their command, year after year. (And once
again, we have no idea when these recordings were made, as documentary
information of the sort is totally & outrageously neglected.
There are also far too many track breaks, making the album a real
hassle to use. It seems almost hostile.) The first mass performance
could probably be more aggressive & lively.... Still, as
performances of c.1500 mass cycles go, these are among the best.
I'm just not that excited by the resulting music (particularly given
Phillips' condescension toward Bauldeweyn). Anyway, if previous
comments are to be believed, there's only one planned issue remaining
in this cycle: I won't try to guess what it might contain, as this
program was already something of a surprise....
[1.12.2019]