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GRAMOPHONE ( 04 / 2018)
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Delphian
DCD34208

Code-barres / Barcode : 801918342080

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Reviewer: Fabrice Fitch

The discography of Hieronymus Praetorius (apparently no relation of the more famous and younger Michael) is small but distinguished, The Cardinall’s Musick and Weser-Renaissance Bremen having devoted anthologies to his motets. Issued in the run-up to Easter, this offering traces the events of Passion Week through a sequence of motets by his contemporaries from Catholic German courts, culminating in a polychoral Mass based on his own motet for the Resurrection itself.

These are accomplished performances, confident, sonorous and full of character. Lassus’s Tristis est anima mea is hardly new to the catalogue but Siglo de Oro do its pathos full justice, with every detail audible and its rhetorical arc firmly yet unobtrusively described. The other motets are treated with the same care, though for sheer impact Lassus is hard to top. (His influence is felt throughout the disc, not least in Praetorius’s compositions, which update his style somewhat, though not markedly.) In the motet and Mass the choir really let rip, while managing to project the text clearly in all but the most contrapuntally intricate passages. The full-throated singing compensates for occasional longueurs in the Mass. In more lightly scored passages the intensity eases off a touch and individual voices sound less secure; but Patrick Allies’s firm grasp of pacing and architecture (demonstrated earlier on) serves both choir and music well. It has been said that the level of musical craftsmanship was perhaps higher in the later Renaissance than at any time before or since, a thesis which this enjoyable disc fully supports.

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