Record Review

Striggio, Mass in 40 Parts, I Fagiolini (Decca); Buxtehude, Scandinavian Cantatas, Theatre of Voices (Dacapo); Meister, Il giardino del piacere, Musica Antiqua Koln (Berlin Classics); Desmarest, Grands Motets Lorrains, Les Arts Florisants (Erato).

Alessandro Striggio’s Ecco Si Beato Giorno was the model for the famous Tallis Spem in Alium, and the challenge that Tallis took on and intended to outdo. In the notes here the Striggio is dated c.1566 and the Tallis at c.1567 and so we take the musicologists’ word for that. At the late night Prom in July 2007, with the Tallis Scholars, I wasn’t immediately convinced that they had much more in common than the arrangement of their forces but I’m not sure that the wide open spaces of the Albert Hall benefit the intensity of such pieces as a smaller, more intimate venue or even the Panasonic mini-system that sits next to my computer here seem to.
Hearing the Striggio for only the second time was much more the revelation one was hoping for, it being given the chance to be heard in similar circumstances to any of the recordings of Spem that are available. And you are never short of choices of those. Here, it is at least partly the tremendous production but also the greater intimacy that an obviously more artificial way of hearing it that allows it to stand alongside on equal terms and, from time to time, I could have been listening to the Tallis for all I knew, it’s just that I know what’s coming next in Spem whereas here, it’s in a way more exciting because it’s fresh and unfamiliar. The Striggio might not achieve quite the same surging oceans of sound, the transitions from one electrifying burst to the next, the dissonance, not necessarily the flux of passion and restraint but if one wasn’t aware which was which one might say that Spem is one tremendous, swirling, organic ‘earthquake’ (as it has been said), and the Striggio brings solo parts more prominently forward. At 8.55, the account of Spem here is perhaps shorter than many, presumably because it is ‘the first to use Hugh Keyte’s radical new edition’. Otherwise, this is a sensational recording that will bear countless replays and if things had been different, we might have been trying to evaluate if the Tallis was really a worthy response, which, of course it is because it’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.
It’s strange to reflect that I have more CD’s of Dietrich Buxtehude’s music than I do of Beethoven or Mozart. I’m not easily tempted to update every LP I ever bought with a CD or now a download and only ever did in the more essential areas of Bach or Monteverdi. The attraction of the Scandinavian Cantatas set was the use of Swedish and Latin texts, but beautiful as it certainly is in places, this rarely provides anything I like better than the Trio Sonatas Op. 1 on Naxos. The sorrowful aria Att Du Jesu Vill Mig Hora sung by soprano Else Torp is simple and affecting. That and the short mass are well worth having. I could manage without the organ praeludia and my selection of Buxtehude recordings is inevitably skewed and unrepresentative by not having the organ music that he is perhaps best known for in it.
Similarly from the baroque period from which Bach learned how to do what he did is the selection of sonatas by Meister from the now defunct Musica Antiqua Koln. Apparently unheard of since, Meister’s music weaves and blends the two violins, cello and harpsichord in lively and spirited fashion that might often be Buxtehude if we hadn’t been told otherwise. In their day, we are told, Telemann was more popular than Bach and I’m sure that if we were given Telemann, Buxtehude or Meister more often there’d be few of us that would have the critical acumen say they weren’t as worthy of our attention. But none of them wrote wrote the Cello Suites, the Brandenburg Concertos or all those wonderful Cantatas. But, even if it’s no more than a curio or interest for it’s own sake, I don’t mind keeping alive the memory of Johann Friedrich Meister (1638-1697) in the variety of these sonatas played with convincing verve and, where necessary, the stateliness to express, as the sleeve note says, the ‘artificial’ craft of composing.
Whereas Louis Desmarest (1661-1741), and thus roughly contemporary with Rameau and Marin Marais if not quite Lully, seems much more the maverick, living on his wits, talents and taking his chances, sort of composer that one can’t help but like. Part of his Wikipedia entry says this (and we wouldn’t want to doubt it, would we),
Desmarets became a frequent visitor to the Saint-Gobert family in Senlis who offered to help him take care of Élisabeth-Madeleine. Both families had been friends since 1689, and Desmarets had given singing lessons to their daughter, Marie-Marguerite when she was fifteen. During these visits, Desmarets and the now eighteen year-old Marie-Marguerite fell in love and within six months of his wife's death, they asked her father for permission to marry. He flatly refused and put his daughter in a convent when he discovered that she was pregnant.
and this disc here passes the minutes in the most elegant distress and then more elaborate piety . It has a suggestion of paradise in it even if we both might know, the composer and the listener, that there is no such thing. Perhaps that’s the little conspiracy that such art allows us to confide in.