Customer Reviews

Court and Dance Music from the Renaissance and Early Baroque

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Having read the two customer reviews, I find myself in between the extremes. While Lena Jacobson does show a penchant for the more astringent and reedy stops, I cannot agree that the sound is shrill and aggravating. I found it quite interesting, and she displayed every facet of the potential sound. The Fredriksborg organ was rebuilt in the 1980s and there is a disc illustrating its mellower side on Marco Polo records. Nevertheless, I would be loth to surrender this recording. I find the clacking of the mechanical action and the occasionally asthmatic sound rather charming. The selections made by Jacobson are winning and the performances are never dull.

The Compenius organ has a unique sound, and is my favorite organ. You can think of it as being an orchestral organ for the orchestra of the 16th century. It's like having all the major Renaissance consorts at your fingertips. The packaging has great detail about the instrument, including all the stops, and which stops are used on which tracks -- something I wish more organ recordings would have.

Unfortunately, the performances are almost unlistenable. The notes speak of "a manner of playing...independent of modern performance practices...'speaking' delivery ... 'breathing' execution...'jeu inegal'. What this means is that Jacobson plays everything staccato and does not play in time. This goes far beyond agogic accent for expresson. These are supposed to be dance pieces, but a transcription of the rhythms would resemble Boulez. There is no sense of line, and this was an age dominated by vocal music. I'm a specialist in early music performance practice, and believe me, nobody else in the world plays this way. Also, the organ is rather closely miked, and rattles like it's 400 years old. It's hard to concentrate on the repertoire (well-chosen for the instrument) when you're wonder which random beat fragment the next note will fall on. There are other recordings of this organ that must be better.

This is early keyboard playing at its best! I especially admire the artist's remarkably keen sense of rhythm and expression. These little pieces which can often sound dull in the hands of other players acquire a new life, no doubt due to Ms. Jacobson's vivid musicianship and insights into Baroque musical rhetoric, as mentioned in the cover-text. To my mind, her performance of this music sounds more like powerful speech and drama than music-as-such. I just love the fantastic sounds of this unique chamber organ, even though one or two tracks present us with sounds that are unfamiliar to our ears and perhaps best characterized as "rich", to employ Michael Palin's apt description of the smell of the durian fruit! Ms. Jacobson has very successfully pulled the right stops - we get to hear lots of tantalizing combinations of early organ sounds, especially the typical Renaissance reed stops! In fact, the whole thing sounds more like a small Renaissance band than the hands and feet of one single musician. I discovered Lena Jacobson only recently - I bought her recording of a selection of Buxtehude's organ works released by deutsche harmonia mundi-BMG. I think this must be the best Buxtehude organ CD to date. Very, very powerful and colorful organ playing! I have to say that compared to these dramatic and virtuoso interpretations of preludes and chorales, most of the competition (such as Vogel) sounds dull and run-of-the-mill. I strongly recommend the Court and Dance Music CD as well as the Buxtehude!

B.I.S. is a highly respected producer of CDs featuring historic instruments and performances with which most major companies wouldn't bother. I've got quite a few of them in my collection. How this particular CD saw the light of day is beyond comprehension. One has only to go to You Tube and search for Ton Koopman's recordings at this instrument to know that it can produce wonderful sounds in many different tonal colors.

Even though one can't easily access other Jacobson recordings to get a sense of how she performs, the Koopman recordings show definitively that much of the blame for this monstrosity has to be laid on the recording engineer and the folks at B.I.S. who ever let this go to market. I've been in the loft at St. Sulpice when the Cavaille-Coll was been played by Daniel Roth and again by Sophie-Veronique Cauchfer-Choplin, and I've heard first hand what rackety pedals and keys sound like. Such extraneous noise could have been removed from the Jacobson/Compenius CD by appropriate placement of the mikes, or by digital after-processing.

Another telling comparison is the You Tube recording by a Dutch organist at the organ of the Fortress Church of Sion, Switzerland. (I'd like to give you the URL, but Amazon would delete it.) That video is also notable for demonstration of the fact that a keyboard with wiggly short keys and an amazingly difficult chromatic rearrangement of the scale going up the "white" and "black" can, nonetheless, be played smoothly.

Court and Dance Music from the Renaissance and Early Baroque. Played on the 1610 Esaias Compenius organ at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, by Lena Jacobson. Recorded in March 1978 at Frederiksborg Castle and released as a CD in 1996 (BIS CD-126). Total playing time: 48'21".

This is a rare beauty of a CD! Its rarity consists in a number of factors: Firstly, there are not too many nearly 400-year-old chamber organs in existence which are still (more or less) in their original condition and can actually be played, so a recital of this kind is only recorded once in a blue moon. (The only even slightly comparable CDs in my collection are some of Gustav Leonhardt's recordings of historical European organs for Wolf Erichson's now-defunct Seon label.) Secondly, it is extremely rare to hear a programme such as this, or indeed to find an organist who would be able to put it together and play it. The majority of the pieces heard here are from 16th century organ tabulatures (comparable with the well-known lute tabulatures). And when did you last hear music by Bernhard Schmid the Elder, Leonard Kleber, Christoph Löffelholtz, Nicolaus Ammerbach or Marco Facoli? Thirdly, it is extremely rare to find an organist with the necessary historical and linguistic skills to produce such a thorough, informative booklet. Lena Jacobson has written no less than five essays for the booklet of this CD, covering the music, the symbolism of the carvings on the case of the organ, the organisation of the keyboards, pedals and pipes of the organ, and its history together with the history of Frederiksborg Castle and its association with the organ. Then there is a biographical article on Esaias Compenius, followed by a complete description of the available stops (including what wood they are constructed from), and, finally, a listing of which stops were used during each individual piece of music. Fourthly, what makes this recording additionally rare in my eyes is the engineering. Maybe I am too sceptical, but I find that sound engineers often have problems recording organ music; this CD, however, originally an analogue LP recorded on tape, has absolutely perfect sound, capturing brilliantly every register (including of course those delightfully old-fashioned reedy-sounding ones!), but also, as a corollary, the mechanical and wheezing sounds of this truly ancient instrument - an organ is not only a keyboard instrument, it is also a wind instrument! The listener is placed almost directly behind Lena Jacobson as she plays; the sound is incredibly clear and present, without ever seeming too close or over-loud. Special praise for producers Musica Poetica and Robert von Bahr!

Of course, all these rarity factors need to be combined with competent, historically informed and musically inspired playing, and I felt that this was just what Lena Jacobson was offering here. For those who listen closely, there are, despite the shortness of the playing time (only 48 minutes - this was originally an LP) untold delights to be heard: Listen to track 2.1, for example, "The Nightingale" from Elizabeth Rogers hir virginall booke, to Nörmiger's "Von Gott wil ich nicht lassen", to Ammerbach's "Ich sag ade", to Cabezon's "Ave maristela" ... and so the list could go on. Lena Jacobson has obviously devoted a great amount of time and effort to this CD, and personally I would, if I could, give it a "rosette" on top of the five stars. But of course, only if you are a lover of ancient instruments and these glorious renaissance sounds!

If you didn't already know this music was performed on "the 1610 Essaias Compenius Organ at the Frederiksborg Castle" in Denmark, there wouldn't be much on Amazon's page to warn you. I love Renaissance dance music, but on this album the tunes are rendered shrill and agonizing to listen to by the squawking, clacking, buzzing organ, which on some tracks sustains a single note throughout the entire track, sounding like an oven timer. This CD just arrived today. I listened to it once, will never listen to it again. A complete waste of money. I'm incredibly disappointed.