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Reviewer: Kate
Bolton-porciatti
As well as being the golden boy in
the golden age of sacred polyphony, Josquin DesPres was also something of the
Paul Simon of his day, and his yearningly melancholic songs (for three to six
voices) were top of the Renaissance pops. This recording unveils some of his
most beguilingly lovely works, adapting them for solo voice with lute
accompaniment, the effect of which is to enhance their liquid, melodic lines.
Josquin’s haunting five- and six-voice laments, Nymphes des bois and Nimphes
napées, for instance, here become achingly personal outpourings of grief
compared with the more ethereal-sounding a cappella performances. Baritone Romain Bockler’s rich, velvet voice captures their predominantly wistful mood, and lutenist Bor Zuljan realises their intricate accompaniments with effortless grace. The voice is a shade dominant in the balance (though this gives the words real immediacy), and Bockler’s use of vibrato occasionally sounds overly Romantic – perhaps an attempt to step away from the ‘whitewashed’ sound more typical of Josquin performances today. Most interesting, though, is Bockler’s liberal ornamentation of the vocal lines which he realises with admirable agility, while Zuljan, drawing on his own research, adds a distinctive colour to several tracks by using frets placed so close to the strings that they buzz like an exotic sitar. Some evidence for both these practices exists in contemporary treatises and lute ‘intabulations’ (highly embellished arrangements of vocal works). The recorded sound has good detail despite the resonant acoustic. In sum, these are revelatory readings to which I’ll return again and again.
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