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Reviewer: David Fallows The Septiesme livre de chansons, printed by Susato in 1545, contains 23 songs in five and six voices credited to Josquin plus four related pieces credited to others. Since a fair number of the works are not known from any earlier source, there is room for wondering how many of them are really by Josquin; but the collection includes quite a few of the most gorgeous songs of the century, so it has always been of major interest to Josquin followers. Oddly, this new issue by the Ensemble Clément Janequin is not quite what it says on the box: they throw in four pieces that are not in the book, including the marvellous ‘Plus nulz regretz’ (sadly with only the first stanza) and two instrumental versions of ‘Mille regretz’. So we have here only just over half of the music in the Septiesme livre, and in ‘Du mien amant’ they omit a chunk of text and get the form quite wrong (the New Josquin Edition would have helped them, here and elsewhere) The Ensemble Clément Janequin have been issuing top-quality discs of 16th-century music for almost 40 years: even if the only member now left over from the original group is the countertenor Dominique Visse, there is a massive body of experience that goes into this. In fact they did an earlier CD of Josquin secular works in 1988 (Harmonia Mundi, 6/89): both discs end with the same piece, ‘Nymphes des bois’; and interestingly the earlier performance lasted almost six minutes to the less than four and a half minutes of the new recording. So while this is more orthodox in having singers on all lines (with discreet accompaniment in most cases from lute or keyboard), the performances are less inclined to sentimenalise the music. |
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