Josquin Desprez - Miserere mei Deus

Josquin Desprez,  Miserere mei Deus, Cappella Amsterdam (Harmonia Mundi)

It's always a good thing to forget what one has ordered and then come home to find it's been delivered and you don't know what it is.
Having spent some of the recent turf profit on Mozart operas, the cooling balm of renaissance polyphony makes for a change from the witty orchestration and sheer delightfulness.
This was an essential purchase for having a new version of the Deploration sur la mort d'Ockeghem, as it is billed here, and to hear the other pieces seen fit to programme with it.
With the Clerk's Group's 1993 recording, as an encore to a disc of Ockeghem himself, indelible by now as the definitive version for me, any comment has to be by way of comparision with that. First impressions are that Cappella Amsterdam are softer, perhaps a fraction quicker, quite probably better recorded but not necessarily as poignant, and if this 3.30 setting of the lament by (no less than) Guillaume Cretin is anything, it is the apotheosis of the poignant. As such, I'm not convinced it is sufficiently dirge-like but my familiarity with the earlier version is always going to be in the way of any subsequent recording and by all means, this would be a sensational find if it had been found first, which for some it inevitably will be.
In a quite brilliant bit of cover design, they use a detail from this Van Eyck painting but only the view of the city from the top right corner and none of the adoration going on in the foreground.

Any difference between Cappella Amsterdam and the Tallis Scholars would begin confidently by noticing that there are more of them, 14 listed but more on the photo, but apparently similar resources used for this record. Perhaps they sound more monastic which might be in part due to the recording conditions in de Waalse Kerk, Amsterdam.
It is rarely a complaint, and only a question, when I wonder if music is taken more quickly than is sometimes good for it. This disc passes soon, and gorgeously, enough for its 66 minutes, especially when trying to think of worthwhile things to say about it but would seem, and be, longer if it lingered more, which there would have been room for. For once, when a record had been reprimanded for going too fast (Don Giovanni by Arnold Ostman and The Drottingholm  Court Theatre Orchestra), it didn't worry me, certainly not in the showpiece arias one really wants it for, but eternity's a long, long time and not to be rushed through in these plaintive lamentations.

The voices blend, the enunciation is careful and we won't ever know if Josquin would have heard his own music done like this or otherwise. 
If we think that the encore here, Musae Jovis by Nicolas Gombert, 45 years Josquin's junior, takes us back to where we came in, that's because it is the companion piece to the Deploration, with the next generation paying their own tribute in similar style,
Cruel and wicked Death,
you who deprive the temples of sweet sounds, 
and the princely courts also  

and if I had been thinking I didn't actually need this record because I have plenty of others like it, no, this is what I bought it to find out about.
Gombert did right by Josquin and the tradition was handed on.