This CD is insidiously beautiful; one of the best recordings of French Chanson of the Renaissance I know.
Pierre-F. Roberge,
medieval.org
Virgin "Veritas"45458
junio de 2000
Auditorium de Pigna, Corsica
Amour, amours
Florilège des chansons françaises de la Renaissance
01 - Pierre CLÉREAU. La lune est costumiere [4:19]
2 sopranos, ténor G, lute
02 - Jean CHARDAVOINE. Quand j'estois
libre (premières strophes) [2:28]
ténor D
03 - Claude LE JEUNE. Revecy venir du printemps [3:48]
tutti: 23 sopranos, mezzo, 2 ténors, basse, lute
04 - Pierre CERTON. Que n'est elle aupres de moy [2:20]
soprano A, mezzo, 2 ténors
05 - Josquin DESPREZ. La plus des plus [7:48]
ténor G, lute
06 - Pierre DE LA RUE. Il viendra le jour désiré
[2:29]
soprano AM, 2 ténors, basse
07 - Roland de LASSUS. La nuict froide et sombre [2:22]
mezzo, 2 ténors, basse
08 - Pierre SANDRIN. Quand je congneu en ma pensée
[1:41]
soprano A, lute
09 - Jean CHARDAVOINE. Quand j'estois
libre (suite) [3:01]
ténor D
10 - Claudin de SERMISY. Jouyssance vous donneray [2:42]
soprano AM, lute
11 - Clément JANEQUIN. O doulx regard [2:59]
soprano AM, 2 ténors, basse
12 - Fabrice Marin CAIETAIN. Amour, amour, donne moy paix ou
trêve [3:58]
soprano A, mezzo, ténor G, basse
13 - Nicolle de CELLIERS D'HESDIN. Helas, ma dame [1:48]
mezzo, 2 sopranos, ténor G
14 - Claude LE JEUNE. Fiere cruelle en amour [4:15]
mezzo, lute
15 - Johannes OCKEGHEM. J'en ay dueil [7:38]
2 sopranos, ténor D, basse
16 - Roland de LASSUS. Mon coeur se recommande à vous
[2:15]
2 sopranos, mezzo, ténor D, basse
17 - Claude LE JEUNE. L'un apreste la glu [4:09]
soprano A, mezzo, ténor D
18 - Jean CHARDAVOINE. Quand j'estois
libre (fin) [2:23]
ténor D
19 - Claudin de SERMISY. Secoures moy, ma dame [5:28]
ténor D, lute
20 - Josquin DESPREZ (attr.). Se congié prens
[3:56]
soprano AM, mezzo, 2 ténors, basse
21 - Josquin DESPREZ. Cuers desolez [2:18]
soprano AM, mezzo, 2 ténors, basse
ENSEMBLE GILLES
BINCHOIS
Dominique Vellard
A Anne Quentin, soprano
AM Anne-Marie Lablaude, soprano
Lena-Susanne Norin, mezzo
G Gerd Türk, ténor
D Dominique Vellard, ténor
Jacques Bona, basse
Eugène Ferré, lute
· · ·
Reeditado en Virgin Veritas X 2 junto con Sola
m'iré:
discografía del Ensemble Gilles Binchois
AMOUR, AMOURS
French Renaissance chansons
If, as Shakespeare wrote, 'music be the food of love', then love is
also the food of music. The pain and yearning of love have been the
inspiration of French song since the medieval troubadours and
trouvères, whose melody not only inspired the Tuscan eloquence
of Petrarch for his beloved Laura, but the round dances that Machaut
composed for his sweet lady of Peronne. And thenceforth, with French
dominating Europe as the language of courtly amours and their singers
entrancing the civilised world with their subtle skills of composition,
came a blossoming of mellifluous polyphony, which reached full flower
in the chanson of the Renaissance.
The French chanson was the leading musical genre of its age - the
carefully crafted symphony, the intimate quartet and the colourful
tone-poem all wrapped into one delightful miniature form. Almost every
poet of the fifteenth and sixteenth century wrote verse and music or
verse for music; and almost every musician wrote chansons. And these
songs were sung not only in the courtly chamber and merchant salon, but
by the strolling players on the boards, the peasants dancing in the
field and the burghers in the town. As the lawyer and amateur musician
Jean Chardavoine observed when noting his Excellentes chansons en
forme de voix de ville, 'they dance and sing them all the time in
town'.
One of the vaudevilles (a term derived from voix de ville)
that Chardavoine published in Paris in 1576, Quand j'estois libre,
provides a recurring refrain to this anthology. The nostalgic melody
sounds as though it had sprung from the depths of time; and indeed the
haunting tune that hovers around just five notes (G, A, B flat, C and
F) is reminiscent of the old troubadours, notably of the
twelfth-century Bernard de Ventadorn who had used the same simple modal
formula for his delightful song of the lark, Quan vei l'aloute mover.
The poetic theme - the loss of the young man's liberty when smitten by
love - was also a favourite with the troubadours; but here the verse
was new, having been published in 1556 as an 'elegy' (Élégie)
of twelve six-line strophes in the Nouvelle continuation des Amours
by Pierre de Ronsard, the greatest lyric poet of his time. The poem was
an instant success at the Valois court, where the king's valet and
keyboard player, Nicolas de la Grotte, set it to music as a chanson for
four voices before 1569, while an arrangement as an 'air de cour' for
solo voice and lute by the King's music printer and lutenist Adrian Le
Roy was published a few years later (1571). Chardavoine must have known
La Grotte's chanson well, for according to Ronsard's early biographer,
Guillaume Colletet, it was sung all over Europe. Yet, while retaining
the same mode (Dorian), limited range and melodic shapes, Chardavoine
transforms the model's flexible triple rhythm in favour of a simpler,
more regular duple metre.
The sacrifice of liberty for love makes a more fleeting appearance in O
doulx regard, an anonymous courtly ten-line epigram in the style of
Mellin de Saint-Gelais set for four voices by Clément Janequin
in his later years. The unusually restrained and suave style of the
piece contrasts with his more typical treatment of amusing amorous
anecdotes in livelier syllabic counterpoint, a vein frequently
encountered in the chansons of other composers (also priests) like
Passereau and Certon. Certon, clerk and choirmaster at the
Sainte-Chapelle in Paris during the reign of Francis I, shows us this
lighter contrapuntal style in Que n'est elle aupres de moy, a
chanson à refrain which expresses the fear of cuckoldry,
complete with a brief episode representing the sycopated clucking of
chickens.
Although such rustic frivolities permeate some of the later
epigrammatic verse of Clement Marot, this 'prince of poets' is shown
here by the more courtly strophic chansons characteristic of Adolescence
clémentine, his first anthology: Secoures moy, Jouyssance
vous donneray and Mon cœur se recommande a vous.
These are little pieces written for Jean de Bouchefort and other
singers of Francis I's royal chamber, who were often accompanied on the
lute by the Mantuan valet de chambre, Alberto da Ripa. Four-voice
settings of the first two of these by the royal chapel choirmaster,
Claudin de Sermisy, appeared in the Chansons nouvelles
published by Pierre Attaingnant in 1528, and were reprinted a vcar
later in a version for a solo voice and lure. In Secoures moy
the lover begs his lady for relief from his ardent passion with more
than kisses: he needs Jouyssance (consummation) - which is
promised in the song Jouyssance vous donneray. Both these songs
inspired a number of instrumental and vocal rearrangements, including
one by the later 'more than divine Orlande' (Lassus) who shows his
mastery of the Marotic vein here in his five-voice setting of the first
strophe of Mon cœur se recommande a vous. By 1560, when
this song was published, free from the syntactic and schematic
repetitions of Sermisy's Parisian chansons, Lassus excels in designing
musical motifs which more closely reflect the imagery of the single
strophe of Marot's song of the suffering heart that must bid farewell
to a love ended by jealous opposition. By 15 76 he has gone even
further down the path of madrigalian through-composition in La
nuict froide et sombre, responding with appropriate musical
figures, rhythmic, melodic or harmonic, to every image and emotion
expressed in the two internal strophes taken from Joachim Du Bellay's
ode De l'inconstance des choses, dedicated to Ronsard (Vers
lyriques, 1549).
The octosyllabic quatrain Il viendra le jour désiré
expresses hope in the future, without any explicit mention of love; but
the poem may be incomplete in the four-voice setting made by Pierre de
La Rue (c1460-1518) for Marguerite of Austria, who wrote and
commissioned many songs of lament for her beloved brother, husband and
parrot (!). La Rue's music is a masterly fugue, skilfully elaborating
the simplest semitonal motif (E-F-E) with imitation, florid extension,
stretto, invertible counterpoint and sequence.
Another noble poem is the eight-line epigram Quand je congneu en ma
pensée by Francis I, set as a four-voice chanson by the
actor-singer Pierre Sandrin in 1538, and performed here as a soprano
solo with ornamental divisions taken from an arrangement in German
keyboard tablature copied around 1550. No word-painting here, although
the changes from triple (galliard) to duple (pavane) rhythm in the
second half of the song may symbolise the poem's turn from pessimism to
optimism as the rewards of dutiful love are realiscd.
While this anthology leaves aside those pieces with overtly obscene
texts, it cannot entirely escape the Gallic predilection for saucy
anecdotes and double entendres that permeate the French chanson in the
sixteenth century. Thus while on the surface the dccasyllabic septain Helas,
ma dame appears to be an anodyne courtly epigram in the style of
Francis I, it is in
fact the second strophe of four in a chanson or ballade which begins
with the words 'Puis qu'elle m'a fermé son huis', which form the
final refrain here. The other strophes, published in anonymous
contemporary collections of chanson verse (c1525-35), make the meaning
clear: since the lady has refused to make love she is rejected. The
four-voice setting published in Paris in 1530 with ascription to
'Hesdin' (Nicolle des Celliers, master of the choirboys at Beauvais
cathedral until his death in 1538), shows another double fugue (like La
Rue's Il viendra) but this time with squarer motifs perhaps
based on popular song (C F F G G A, etc.) and repetitive syntactic
phrases typical of the Parisian chansons of Sermisy, Janequin, Certon
and Sandrin.
The sonnet Amour, amour appeared in Pierre de Ronsard's Amours,
which was dedicated to his beloved Cassandre Salviati and published in
1552 with an appendix of models for singing sonnets and odes by Certon,
Janequin, Goudimel and the poet's friend Marc-Antoine de Muret. But
neutral, fixed models composed to fit any poem of the same prosodic and
rhyme structure were no longer the order of the day by the 1570s, when
Lassus, Bertrand, Maletty, Blockland and Utendal set this poem. The
same was true for the Neapolitan organist Fabrice Marin Caietain, who
in 1571 came from Lorraine, where he had been in the service of the
powerful Guise family as choirmaster at Toul cathedral, to Paris to
publish his music. A collection of his strophic Airs, appearing
in 1576, reflects the lessons in flexible declamation and recitation
which he had received from the lyre-player Courville and the singer
Beaulieu - the guiding lights at the first meetings of the Academy of
Poetry and Music founded by the poet Jean-Antoine de Baïf to
recreate the fabled effects of lyric verse measured and sung to the
metres of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But Caietain's Airs
begin with this conventional sonnet set in through-composed form as a
series of short and varied motifs, some mildly chromatic, gently
responding to Ronsard's text which likens love to a lost battle where
only death can offer relief from suffering.
Caietain occasionally set vers mesurés, but Bâif's
more constant collaborator in this enterprise at the Académie
was Claude Le Jeune, who provides three such pieces in this recording.
The most famous is the catchy galliard Revecy venir du printemps,
which varies the vocal groups between the strophes ('chants') and
refrains ('rechants') which celebrate the amorous season when Nature
blossoms and springs to life and Cupid's arrows sow the seeds of happy
love. Also published in Le Jeune's Airs of 1608 is the
virtuosic trio L'un apreste la glu - another chansonnette
mesurée by Bail which sings of the frustrations of Spring. Fiere
cruelle, published for four voices much earlier (1583), is
performed here by solo alto with the three lower parts played on the
lute, as was commonly the practice for chansons and airs at that time.
The measured verse, anonymous but perhaps penned by Baïf, offers
another variation on the theme of love's cruel game as being more
painful than death. The pain of Ronsard's love for Cassandre is again
eloquently expressed in his ode La lune est coustumiere,
ironically set in light dancing rhythm for three high voices by Pierre
Cléreau, who, like Caietain after him, served the Guises in
Lorraine.
The earliest pieces in this anthology take us back to the most
conventional expressions of courtly love in the fixed forms of the late
fifteenth-century rhetorical poets. The ubiquitous theme of desire for
death as relief from the pain of passion recurs in the anonymous
rondeau J'en ay dueil, most movingly set, with long arched
melodic phrases passing fugally between the four voices, by the great
Johannes Ockeghem. His disciple Josquin Desprez published in Venice, in
the first printed collection of music (Petrucci's Odhecaton of
1501), a three-voice setting of the rondeau La plus des plus,
which hyperbolically extols the virtues of the beloved with a fugal
development of the melodic tetrachord motif E-F-G-A-G-F-E. The ballade Se
congié prens vows separation after unrequited love. The full
text (four strophes) is found with a melody (D-F-E-D etc.) in the
monophonic chansonnier Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Ms. Fr.
12744 (ed. G. Paris, Chansons du XVe siècle, Paris,
1875, no. 52). After being set for four voices by Japart in Petrucci's Odhecaton,
the same melody is rewoven into a masterly six-voice tapestry
attributed to Josquin in a collection of songs published posthumously
(1545) in Antwerp.
The last piece, a lament by Josquin, was published posthumously in
Paris in 1528. The plainchant Plorans ploravit from the
Lamentations of Jeremiah is intoned as a cantus firmus in long notes
(F-G-A-B flat-A etc.) by the second tenor, while four more voices weave
around it a sorrowful counterpoint with a French paraphrase of the
Latin text. The song of love thus ends with the death the grieving
lover seeks.
Frank Dobbins