Johannes REGIS (c.1425-1496)
Celsitonantis ave genetrix / Abrahae fir promissio [07:13]
Missa Ecce ancilla Domnini / Ne timeas Maria [39:47]
Ave Maria virgo serena à 5 [07:26]
Ave Maria à 3 [02:20]
Lux solemnis / Repleti sunt omnes [10:07]
Clangat plebs [07:17]
Missa L’homme armé / Dum sacrum mysterium [29:12]
Lauda Syon / Ego sum panis vivus [06:17]
Puisque ma damme / Je m’en voy [01:54]
S’il vous plaist [01:27]
Patrem vilayge [03:44]
O admirabile commercium / Verbum caro factum est [07:27]
The Clerks (Carys Lane, Helen Neeves (soprano), Lucy Ballard, Ruth Massey (alto),
Tom Ruskin, Christopher Watson (tenor), Jonathan Arnold, Robert MacDonald (bass))/Edward
Wickham (bass, director)
rec. 27-30 August 2008, Chapel of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge
Texts and Translations included
MUSIQUE EN WALLONIE MEW 0848/9 [67:57 + 58:36]
Regis was undoubtedly amongst the most significant composers of church music
in the fifteenth century and was held in high regard by his contemporaries.
Until quite recently, however, his music has been relatively neglected, before
a flurry of publications and conferences in recent years. A first complete
recording of his surviving works would, under pretty well any circumstances,
be something to welcome; when it is as well sung as this present CD is, with
a scholarly approach which in no way inhibits the sheer beauty of the results,
it deserves a particularly warm welcome.
Little or nothing is known of Regis - sometimes referred to as Jehan Leroy
- before he is recorded in 1451 as Master of the Choristers at the collegiate
church of St Vincent, Soignies, in the diocese of Cambrai. The church at Soignies
was a place of some musical importance and during the years between 1450 and
1460 Regis’s colleagues included the composers Gilles de Binchois and
Guillaume de Malbècque, both a generation older than Regis. Regis evidently
came to the attention of Guillaume Dufay (b. c.1397), since he was invited
to become master of the choirboys at Cambrai, but he seems to have preferred
to stay at St Vincent, where in 1462 he was named scholasticus, a position
he held until his death.
It is perhaps of Dufay and Binchois that the listener is most likely to think
in listening to the music of Regis, sharing as he does their fondness for the
use of chanson or chanson-like melodies in his religious works. Of Regis’s
own chansons only two seem to survive, and both are so good that that is a
cause for some sadness. ‘Puisque ma damme’ has a moving dignity;
as only rarely happens in such music one is actually made to believe the implied
speaker’s declaration:
Je m’en voy et mon cueur demeure:
Je chante et fay larmes de l’euil;
Je m’esbas et si n’ay que dueil;
Je ris, et mon euil pleaure.
(Though I leave, my heart remains;
Though I sing, tears fall from my eyes;
Though I seek distraction, I find only sadness;
Though I laugh, my eyes weep).
The more hopeful sentiments of ‘S’il vous plaist’ are articulated
in a brief, but texturally transparent setting of beguiling beauty.
The greater body of Regis’s surviving work consists of music written
for the church. Two substantial masses survive. The Missa L’homme armé was
copied into the choirbook of Cambrai Cathedral between 1462 and 1465, which
has claims to be the earliest recorded evidence of a ‘L’homme armé’ mass
- though Dufay and Ockeghem probably preceded him in the use of this melody
as the cantus firmus for a mass. This setting by Regis is particularly
interesting for the way its use of ‘L’homme armé’ is
combined with textual materials from the antiphon ‘Dum sacrum mysterium’,
an antiphon concerned with St Michael, Protector of the Church Militant and
leader of the heavenly armies against Lucifer, so that the original secular
song’s announcement that “L'homme armé doibt on doubter” (the
armed man should be feared) effects an implicit warning to the sinful. Musically
the mass is striking for its use of canon and for the way that each of the
five sections is introduced by a motto figure which has - as the Regis scholar
Sean Gallagher observes in his booklet notes - “a surprisingly ‘modern’ sound
in terms of its harmonies”. The other mass, the lengthy Missa ancilla
Domini, is evidently related to Dufay’s Missa Ecce ancila Domini, both
making use of the same unusual version of the antiphon, and both making use
of more than one cantus firmus, still a relatively unusual procedure at this
date. Another fine work, graceful and harmonically inventive as well as moving
in its spirituality, Regis’s Missa ancilla Domini is also memorable for
the way in which, in the Credo, the words “vivos et mortuos” are
foregrounded in some extended sonorities startlingly at odds with the rapidly
changing polyphonic textures all around them.
Regis’s motets seem to have attracted the greatest praise and attention
from his contemporaries. In part this was because they were five-voice works
at a time when music of more than four voices was still uncommon. The resulting
possibilities for contrast and textual complexity give the music a distinctive
quality, though for all Regis’s obvious interest in such matters he also
displays a constant awareness of the significance of the texts he is setting.
The Christmas motet ‘O amirabile commercium’, while vivacious and
technically demanding of its performers, also perfectly communicates the wonder
and excitement of its celebratory text, so that musical complexity never becomes
merely self-indulgent. The five-voice Ave Maria is full of fascinating patterns
of imitation between and across voices, while the brief three-voice Ave Maria
could, musically, carry a text in praise of a secular beloved with no inappropriateness,
bringing us back to the influence of the chanson in a musical reflection of
that literary phenomenon of the time, in which texts to beloved lady or to
the Virgin Mary can be well-nigh impossible to distinguish.
In short, this is a set which enables a reappraisal of an important, fascinating
and rewarding figure. The singing of The Clerks is exemplary, in terms both
of technical competence and alertness to the texts, as well as in the sheer
beauty and clarity of texture they produce. The recording, made in the chapel
of St. Catherine’s College Cambridge - of which Edward Wickham is Director
of Music - is also a model of its kind. The presentation, in a sort of mini-book,
attractively illustrated and with full texts and translations as well as a
very useful essay by Sean Gallagher, leaves little to be desired either … and
you get a lovely Annunciation by Roger van der Weyden on the front cover!
Glyn Pursglove