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GRAMOPHONE (02/2025)
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Alpha  Alpha1084 

Code barres / Barcode : 3701624510841

Reviewer : Edward Breen

If Lassus had a TikTok account, I’d like to think that some of his posts would sound a bit like this: Renaissance genius with modern filters. This album is an expanded version of a documentary soundtrack featuring music by Lassus projected via the imagination of SimonPierre Bestion ‘into our 21st-century world’. Inspiration, however, came not just from Orlando’s music but also from Virginia Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine): also born in the Renaissance and also timeless.

There are so many levels to Lassus’s music, from the elegant edifice of In Monte Oliveti to the saucy swagger of the Italian madrigal Allala pia calia; in performance, too, from the careful clarity of Stile Antico to the theatrical thrill of Ensemble Clément Janequin. Here, in the hands of Simon-Pierre Bestion, we are in next-level territory – albeit not entirely unexpectedly, since this is not the first time I have praised the combination of polyphony with a Fender Rhodes synthesiser in these pages (see Thélème, A/22).

As an album it radiates an inventive glee similar to Uri Caine’s Goldberg Variations (Winter & Winter, 10/00). Consider the Ikea-esque build-your-own-motet approach of Super flumina Babylonis. Staccato entries declaiming single letters grow to syllables and words, then finally to whole phrases. Yet in Allala pia calia – to me forever the domain of Dominique Visse’s reedy brilliance (Harmonia Mundi, 2/93) – the delightful drunken ‘gnam-gnam’-style energy comes through but the percussion makes obvious a layer of hilarity that Lassus had already successfully implied. This is one case where I’d have loved less.

In Monte Oliveti, singled out as having ‘been altered very little’, receives stylish vocal ornamentation and showcases the sonic brilliance of both composer and ensemble, a contrast to the opening of Dulces exuviae, where saxophone and blushing cymbals remind me of a 1980s chocolate advert. However, there is unhurried beauty in Quam pulchra es, one of a surprising number of moments of repose in what I wrongly assumed to be a frenetic programme. Don’t mistake all this inventiveness for gimmickry, though: Eripe me is profoundly melancholic and smoothly phrased despite the anachronistic instrumentation. Ending with a sombre performance of the Requiem’s Introit, replete with stylish ornamentation, was a stroke of genius.

The booklet has a fabulous sequence of hipster-Holbein-style portraits of Simon-Pierre Bestion channelling his inner Tilda Swinton. However good the product and the packaging, I am left wistful for HIP performances since, like TikTok, these tracks make me feel my age.

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