This is one of those releases which only comes along
once in a blue moon - a newly rediscovered Renaissance masterpiece
given its first commercial recording after a good deal of hard
work and scholarly research and serious decision-making. ‘The
Making of Striggio’ documentary explains pretty much all
you would want to know about Alessandro Striggio and the context
of the music on this recording. Born in Mantua, Striggio was
based both there and as a member of the Medici court in Florence.
The 40 part Ecce beatem lucem is already well known from
its 1980 edition by Hugh Keyte, and formed the basis of the
Mass on Ecco sì beato giorno. This was written
as a gift for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, all part
of a certain amount of political manoeuvring which involved
Striggio travelling as far as London, where evidence strongly
suggests his settings were an influence on events in England,
resulting in Tallis writing Spem in Alium. The Mass was
believed lost for many years, and only uncovered in Paris quite
recently by Davitt Moroney.
As Robert Hollingworth points out in the DVD, there is no qualitative
choice to be made between Striggio’s music and Tallis’s
in the same field. The Striggio settings pre-date Spem in
alium by a number of years and inhabit a different stylistic
time and space. Hollingworth has ‘gone down the Munich
route’, taking the illustrations and documentation of
known performances of the Mass with a large array of instruments.
This serves to enrich an already mighty feast of vocal noise,
and the initial impact of the music makes you feel as if you
could levitate on its luxuriant sound with relative ease. Striggio’s
Missa Ecco sì beato giorno is where most of the
attention will be focussed with this release. It is a mesmerising
sequence of often slowly moving harmonies. The large scale of
the forces used and the acoustic in which they are working unite
these elements into an organic whole. Compared with Tallis the
harmonic language is indeed relatively conservative, but is
certainly not lacking in colour and drama. There are points
at which the contrasts of transparency and the full force of
the entire ensemble have a telling effect for instance in those
breathtaking tutti moments and in the Gloria.
There the music shifts in fluid motion between soloists and
individual choirs.
This recording has brought together representatives from numerous
early music specialist ensembles such as Fretwork and the Rose
Consort, but the performance doesn’t shy away from full-blooded
projection, and the vocalists are given free rein to let loose
with plenty of vibrato when everyone is giving their all. This
recording may indeed even serve as a substitute hair-dryer when
all voices are in full flow. Tastes will no doubt differ on
this subject. My opinion is that such a huge body of sound needs
the weight of ‘proper singing’, and that the moments
where a little more restraint helps the sense of contrast between
vast-scale music-making and more intimate episodes have been
used sensibly. Take the gentler opening of the Sanctus,
where there is a good deal of reserve and subtle shading in
the colour of the singing, the richer choral sound held back
until later on. This is one of those pieces for which you need
to abandon your modern sense of time and enter an entirely different
world. Events unfold slowly and grow and develop at a more monumental
pace than the relatively compact Tallis work. In part of the
documentary the sound engineer mentions a balance which has
to be struck between clarity and overall perspective; indeed,
the words of the Mass are less easily followed the more voices
are thrown at them. This however is not really the point. It
is the import; the meaning and religious feeling behind the
words which is decisive, and with this piece there is no avoiding
the fervour of the message in this Mass. It is a splendid masterpiece,
and I feel privileged to be able to hear it.
The collection of other works which support the Mass also have
plenty of interest. Striggio’s mastery of the viol is
represented by a sizeable consort of these instruments backing
a superb lute solo in Vincenzo Galilei’s Contrapunto
Secundo di BM. Striggio in fact wrote relatively few sacred
works, and the vocal pieces which follow are occasional works
and examples from the composer’s books of madrigals. D’ogni
gratia et d’amor was written to commemorate his visit
to England, where he was received by Queen Elizabeth and the
‘virtuosi of the music profession there’. These
are all fine works given impressive and richly instrumented
performances, and serve to put the bigger settings into a context
of what would have been more familiar fare in the courts of
Renaissance Europe.
Thomas Tallis’s magnificent Spem in alium concludes
the programme preceded by its plainchant version. Tallis’s
work is described in the booklet notes as ‘simultaneously
a tribute to Striggio and a determined effort to upstage him’.
This recording is the first to use Hugh Keyte’s new edition
of the work, and the forty vocal parts are simultaneously divided
between accompanying viols, sackbuts, cornets and dulcians.
Opinion may diverge as to whether this approach is an improvement,
buy it certainly seems to be a valid interpretation, and fits
in well with the sonic palette of the rest of the recording.
We are more used to hearing this with the weight and impact
of the voices as a unified whole, and the instruments in a way
serve to diffuse this effect, providing different textures and
highlighting some lines where they would otherwise have blended
as part of an all-vocal homogeny. There is no shortage of voice-only
Spem in alium recordings however, and with this entire
release aimed at shifting our entire outlook on these period
masterpieces I’m happy to have encountered this version,
and though it doesn’t quite have the tear-jerking effect
of the best a-cappella versions Tallis’s scrunchy dissonances
and breathtaking harmonic progressions do sound wonderful, and
provide a fitting conclusion to the programme.
The extra DVD not only offers a neat little documentary on this
production, but also has 5.1 surround sound mixes of the performances
of all of the 40-part pieces, the effect of which results in
your feeling as if you are sitting at the centre of all of the
choirs and instruments. On a good system the effect of this
can be quite overwhelming, the shifting movement of vast sounds
crossing your auditory horizon like the shadows of clouds moving
across a beautiful, gently undulating landscape.
All in all this is an adventurous and truly magnificent release,
and one which no lover of good choral music should be without.
Dominy Clements
I Fagiolini/Robert Hollingworth 
