It should come as no surprise to most of my friends and students that I’m a fairly avid record collector. I’m curious about a lot of different music, and I want to get to know it. Recordings are often the fastest way to go about this. So I’ll be posting some entries about recordings I’ve gotten recently, and my reactions to them.
So to start, the first ten volumes of the “Century” series from Harmonia Mundi. This is a 20-volume set of recordings covering the whole of music history, with one CD devoted to each major period or subdivision thereof. I figured the second 10 volumes would be redundant (they start with the Baroque) but those first ten just might be very useful. I sampled one of the recordings first–volume 4, devoted to the troubadours, trouveres, and their ilk. I found this absolutely delightful, a solid mix of the many different idioms of the era given a fine set of performances. Therefore, I went ahead and ordered the first ten volumes.
Among the highlights of the set, so far, for me:
Chant performing: in several of the volumes (particularly Volume 2, devoted to non-Gregorian Christian chant), the performers are adopting styles of performances influenced by the middle East, rather than hewing to the line established by 19th-century French monks as the definitive plainchant performance style. I’ve never been fully convinced by the orthodoxy of that white, clear style. After all, the plainchant of the rest of the world is a lot more florid, ornamented, and vocally interesting–and their notation is just about as imprecise as is the Christian notation. Anyway, I found many of these performances a welcome break from the usual sanctimonious Norton Anthology stuff.
Ars antiqua motets: some of these, from volume 5, are positively ravishing. We seem to have gone a lot of different directions in attempting to reconstruct performance styles for 13th century polyphonic works. When I was in college, the general style was stultifying and dull: usually a bunch of barely-adequate voices singing in blunt rhythm, without any attempt at style or panache. And then the wheel turned with people like David Munrow, but I found that some of those later performances tended towards the militant and raucous, even if the music didn’t really justify it. (At least they weren’t boring.) But some of the performances on this set really explore the sheer beauty of the music. The performers are concerned with being expressive, while at the same time allowing a much more florid vocal style than would be found in most “historical” recordings.
Early instrumental music: this particular member of the set (volume 10) is a lot of fun, consisting as it does of some of the earliest styles of instrumental music, from the Renaissance. Thus it features composers one doesn’t hear as a rule: De Rore, Ferrabosco, and such, in lively performances. There’s a fascinating instrumental version of a Josquin chanson on the set.
It’s a big set and so I’ll be discovering all of its jewels for some time.