This reviewer would never have expected to
find himself in a position of saying that one of the most remarkable
recordings heard in years was a disc of one man singing unaccompanied
chant for over an hour. But, so it is. This disc upset every
preconception this writer has ever entertained about Gregorian
chant. Many listeners may think that they know what Gregorian
chant sounds like. Fair enough, but - believe it - you don’t!
This recording is the sort of disc for which
the ‘early music movement’ was invented. It is much more than
just a recording of some music, however fine or historic. The
preconceptions that we all entertain about Gregorian Chant (for
anybody over 30, probably based on the chosen listening of the
dreadfully dull husband played by Geoffrey Palmer in the 1970s
BBCTV sitcom "Butterflies") do not necessarily allow
us to consider this repertoire as virtuoso music of incredible
breadth and power. The soloist on this disc, Abbé Damien
Poisblaud, uses the booklet note to outline a convincing argument
for the necessity to rethink the way we perceive chant and its
performance. His well structured and lucid notes revolve around
the principal concepts that chant is part of a continuous oral
tradition and that the performance of such unaccompanied music
would normally have been undertaken in ‘just intonation’ i.e.
pure tuning of intervals such as the fourth and fifth, which
can sound strange to modern ears used to ‘equal temperament’.
He has also carried out much research into the nature of early
vowel pronunciations. As it is vowels that give singing its
distinctive colour, this also is something that modern ears
are not used to hearing. His other main premise is that this
music was not designed to be sung by a choir of monks, but by
highly skilled solo singers, using embellishment and improvisation
techniques to enliven and enlighten the performance. Much of
this research was based on surviving oral traditions from the
Mediterranean region and then applied to the early sources of
chant.
The end result of all this is a recording that
comes as a revelation. Certainly the sound is unfamiliar, in
places it is even bordering on the unattractive, and yet all
the time there is a hard-to-shake-off feeling that this is very
probably ‘how it was’. It takes a little time to get used to
the sound, the tuning and the acoustic - more time than the
samples here allow - but after a few tracks it all seems to
make perfect sense. It seems ‘natural’ and that is the hardest
thing to achieve in the false atmosphere of a recording.
The performances could have fallen into the
merely ‘interesting’ category if they were not so convincingly
brought across by the recording itself. It is interesting to
note that the CD cover mentions the name of the venue in larger
letters than that of the performer. This is justified. The acoustic
of the Abbey of Thoronet is the single aspect that convinces
this writer most about the premise advanced. The sheer beauty
of the sound that results from singing into such an astonishing
acoustic seems so ‘right’ for the music. That the engineers
should have been able to capture the clarity of the performance
and the splendour of the acoustic without compromising either
is a sure credit to them. This is a rarely exceptional recording,
which is most highly recommended.
Peter Wells
Abbé
Damien Poisblaud 