It was over the twenty or more years that Gothic Voices were
producing their annual and eagerly awaited recording; in all
about twenty discs. There is no doubt that although Christopher
Page caused much controversy in the otherwise quiet coterie
of early music scholarship their performances were often riveting,
involving and exciting. One admired the ensemble work, the choice
of repertoire, the revealing booklet notes and the sheer quality
of the singing. Almost everything was a cappella with
just an occasional medieval harp which Page himself played.
It seemed that the music spoke much better without the colourings
of weird and wonderful crumhorns, cornemuse and percussion that
we had been used to. To a great degree this is an opinion still
held by many including this reviewer.
All that said, I started to have some reservations in the mid-1990s,
if not earlier, when I first heard an a cappella version
of Machaut’s Rose Liz by the American group Project
Ars Nova on New Albion Records (NA068). I knew the Gothic Voices
version on The Mirror of Narcissus (Hyperion CDA 66087)
but had come to find it chaste and overly clean, very open and
front of the mouth. This American version was a little more
closed, subtle and rather more melancholy with a lovely rubato-like
sensitivity to line that Page’s bright, harder-edged reading
did not possess. I fell in love with this music for the first
time.
I then started to ask myself questions about dynamics. I have
sung much early music from my boyhood and listened to and studied
a great deal. I am aware that the audience’s attention
often needs to be held and one way of achieving this is through
dynamic shading. This is surely a natural and needful thing
for performers and listeners. In the GV recordings of secular
music most of the pieces last two or three minutes and in that
case the problem is not especially acute however when they started
to tackle Mass settings, spinning polyphony over an extended
period then lack of dynamic colouring became a problem. We have
no idea how medieval musicians approached dynamics and many
will argue that the general thinning and thickening of texture,
the rise and fall of lines will create dynamics naturally. I
have remained unconvinced.
I needed to listen again to a continental group and get away
from the Oxbridge sound that GV represented. I didn’t
have far to look. I chose a Mass by de La Rue’s contemporary
Josquin, his Missa Gaudeamus performed by A Sei Voce.
This was recorded in 1997 (Auvidis E8612). They use a slightly
larger group, but one to a part for certain sections and children
on the top part, but that’s another story. I only had
to go as far as the opening Kyrie to hear a superb dynamic
contrast between the Kyrie and the Christe which
was hushed and mysterious. Throughout their performance dynamic
contrast serving to highlight structure and text is prevalent.
This makes their performance not only more musically interesting
but also spiritually more concentrated. Dynamic contrasts like
this might be considered to be Romantic but who is to say that
to a certain extent this is not what Josquin and de la Rue expected
to happen.
As I listened to de la Rue’s motet, the canonic six-part
Pater de celis Deus, recorded here by GV,
I realized how incredibly uninteresting, inexpressive and even
dull the performance was. I have felt the same about GV’s
recording of the anonymous Missa Caput (Hyperion CDA66857).
Another reason I started to feel this was because of the unrelenting
tempo. The Missa de Feria is an extremely
professional piece of work. It is meant as a workaday or as
lay-clerks often call these things ‘washday’ service
but if it has anything at all profound to say then through this
performance or the music itself it has sadly eluded me. One
other reason may be, and setting aside for one minute the scholarly
need for solid evidence, is that surely there needs to be tempo
variety of some sort. A Sei Voce as well as other (often continental)
groups attend to this, quite naturally depending on the exigencies
of the text, not in an excessive (Romantic) sense but by using
their musical sensibilities both as performers and as potential
listeners.
In his brilliantly argued book ‘The Modern Invention of
Medieval Music’ (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Daniel
Leech-Wilkinson devotes over twenty pages to discussion of GV’s
CDs sometimes in some detail. Even so, he never once mentions
this de La Rue disc and the reason, I believe, is that it is
not one of their most interesting or, for that matter, most
controversial discs. In addition Pierre de La Rue himself is
something of an outsider never having been taken up by a writer
or group. He is less impressive, less innovative, less tightly
ordered than say Josquin or Brumel. His music is even more imitative
than that of his contemporaries and seems to be a little too
clever. One wonders why Page decided to record him.
Let’s look at the always informative and useful booklet
notes. He writes that the composer “is still very little
known” and very prolific having written “twenty-nine
masses ... six Magnificats, fourteen motets” and much
more. He adds later that the group, being unfamiliar with the
style, found “themselves initially disorientated”.
I have a feeling that he is being more honest here than he realized.
Having said all of that - and I’m sorry not to be entirely
helpful - the four-voiced Missa Sancta Dei genetrix
comes off well. I can’t decide if it’s because the
singers are more on top of de la Rue’s language or whether,
and this seems more likely, it is a much better piece. It is
succinct and based on a memorable head motif. Page describes
it as “radiant”. I’m not sure, having known
this CD now for a dozen years, if I quite feel that myself.
However, the expressive nature of the lines, especially the
bass part, enables GV to bounce the ideas off each other like
chamber music. Page describes the effect as “mutual dependency
and co-operation”.
An especially charming feature of the disc is the sequence of
three motets transcribed in the style of Phalèse the
Louvainese music publisher and known to de la Rue. The transcriber,
Christopher Wilson, plays them with Shirley Rumsey. They are
mostly unadorned and reflect “the Flemish or north European
tradition of lute playing in the lifetime of the composer.”
Gary Higginson
Gothic Voices/Christopher Page 
