This CD, a recording of a live performance by Paul van Nevel's choir of mixed voices, Huelgas Ensemble, features a program that is fraught with peril -- large-scale a cappella Renaissance music with 12 to 40 individual parts. To make it through such a treacherous program without a tonal train wreck would be an achievement, but the ensemble ...
In the late sixteenth century, the top composer in terms of popularity and publications was Orlande de Lassus. If a listener were to judge Lassus' primacy from available recordings, however, one wouldn't be able to arrive at that conclusion: less than ten percent of his overall output has been recorded in any form. Part of the problem is ...
The notes to this Harmonia Mundi disc proclaim Flemish composer Jacobus de Kerle (1531 or 1532-1591) as a "forgotten master of counterpoint," and the contents do a good job of justifying the claim. The career of de Kerle has much in common with that of Orlande de Lassus: both were well-trained northerners who plied their trade around southern and ...
The cover of this album implies that the music within has something directly to do with Leonardo da Vinci or the story of the Da Vinci Code book and film, which it does not. But the success of the whole Da Vinci Code phenomenon provides a reasonable excuse for a disc that introduces a bit of the music da Vinci would have heard and known. Most ...
Historical novelists, take note! The life of Italian-English composer Alfonso Ferrabosco (1543-1588) would make a terrific tale with its mix of music and political intrigue. Ferrabosco moved from Catholic Italy to Anglican England as a young man and served, depending on who is to be believed, as a diplomat, a spy for Queen Elizabeth, or a double ...
This three-CD set from Harmonia Mundi purports on the packaging to offer "the finest masses in musical history." Of course that's an impossible goal, and the liner notes back off from it with various disclaimers. The question to ask about a set like this, assembled from existing Harmonia Mundi releases going back to 1986, is whether it either ...
Originally recorded in 1997, this disc by the Renaissance-specializing Huelgas Ensemble and leader Paul van Nevel unearthed some gorgeous examples of the long tradition of Lamentations, settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, complete with their incantatory Hebrew initial letters (Aleph, Beth...). The tradition lasted for centuries (Couperin's ...
As with the other discs of vocal music in Harmonia Mundi's Century: A History of Music series, it's a shame that this one includes no song texts. For the newcomer, at whom such a series is presumably aimed, there's no better anchor than knowing what the performers are singing about. But for that, this disc offers a nearly ideal introduction to the ...
Alexander Agricola was viewed in his time as one of the major musical artists of his day; in old sources, he is referred to as "the divine Alexander" -- a source dating to 1503 states that Agricola could "make music shine clearer than the finest silver." That his reputation, even among many experts in Renaissance music, has not survived since ...
Paul van Nevel is unquestionably one of the mainstays among artists who specialize in gothic and Renaissance choral music. Having founded the Huelgas Ensemble in 1971, his catalog of recordings begins in the late '70s when his group was recording for the Belgian labels; one of the few early music specialists from his time still active, van Nevel ...
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