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The Gesualdo Six, an ensemble of male voices, was formed in Cambridge in 2014 to perform Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories of 1611. Following a debut recording of English motets (4/18), the group has gone on to record not so much the late music of Gesualdo and his contemporaries, with its legendary piercing dissonances and startling chromatic chord juxtapositions, but rather earlier repertories, notably with the critically acclaimed ‘Josquin’s Legacy’ (11/21), an ingenious piece of programme planning.
The membership of the group has changed since its foundation, but not the original line-up of countertenor, two tenors, baritone and two basses, which produces an immediately recognisable palette, mellow and euphonious. The firm anchors of the resulting rich texture are the countertenor Guy James (who has devised the record and prepared the editions) and the bass Owain Park, who directs the group and here contributes one of his own compositions. Its strengths are on full display from the opening of the very first piece, Brumel’s Sub tuum praesidium, an effectively simple Marian prayer whose chordal opening shows off the finely gramophone.co.uk integrated power of the perfectly matched lower voices to great effect. This darkly sonorous texture is at its best in some of the larger-scale pieces such as the wellknown seven-voice Ego flos campi by Clemens non Papa, and above all in Josquin’s architecturally towering masterpiece Praeter rerum seriem.
At the centre of the disc is a group of ‘regretz’ chansons, the starting point for the title of the disc, inspired by the life of Anne of Brittany, beginning with pieces written for Margaret of Austria and preserved in the chansonnier that she commissioned. These include Pierre de la Rue’s Secretz regretz and Antoine Brumel’s effectively plangent Du tout plongiet/Fors seulement, while other pieces on the record are taken from two other important French sources, one in the Pepys Library in Cambridge, the other the optimistically named ‘Anne Boleyn Book’ in the Royal College of Music.
All in all this is a treasure trove of works, some little known and rarely performed, in a wide variety of styles and vocal scorings spanning the first half of the 16th century. Beautifully sung and meticulously researched, it will generously repay repeated hearings. |
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