But wait, as the lament for the destruction of Jerusalem begins with,
Ierusalem desolata est,
surely that's the triosieme of Francois Couperin's Trois Lecons de Tenebres. I'd recognize it anywhere and do. But Byrd came first, by over a hundred years, so was my favourite piece of music lifted from somebody else. It's like finding that Zadok the Priest could have come from an Albinoni Oboe Concerto published two years earlier. I'm sure somebody else must have noticed but you get nowhere putting 'Byrd Civitas Couperin Tenebres' or any such thing into Google. Couperin is likely to have known the Byrd setting, is he, through performance or publication rather than on disc or download. A musicologist with knowledge of this refined area would know- perhaps it's a standard refrain that turns up regularly and I'll be onto Tallis's Lamentations to see what he does in due course- but Peter Phillips wisely keeps his e-mail address off the Tallis Scholars' website so I can't bother him with my inane question.
Jerusalem was laid waste, it seems by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, after a siege, in 587 BC. It's difficult to take sides but one would be generally against laying waste to the having been captured city. The piteous lament based on the book of Jeremiah has been tearing composers of choral music apart ever since but for me it began with Jordi Savall's soundtrack to the film Tous les Matins du Monde. Stop me if you've heard it all before.
The last time this music emerged mysteriously and unexpectedly was the Brodsky's playing Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae when I realized something was happening and when it arrived, realized what it was. There have been few more spine-tingling moments in music than that.
In this month's Gramophone, Lindsay Kemp reviews another new release of the Couperin describing the Lecons as 'achingly beautiful' and 'wondrous' which is no understatement but, having five recordings already- all justified by their differentiation- one wonders how many one needs when it is James Bowman and Michael Chance, the first known and thus best loved, I usually turn to. One feels the early onset of the debilitating madness of completism but Lindsay gives the new record full approval, there is still room for more of a very good thing and we may not be the young ones very long.
