Customer Reviews

Gombert: Tribulatio et Angustia

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Gombert has for quite a while been my favourite Renaissance composer other than Josquin, but he's been rising in my esteem as I've heard more of his music. I think with this disk, I'll put him on a par with Josquin in my mind. I was close to that already, because of the eight Magnificats recorded by Peter Philips with the Tallis Scholars.

His style is closer to his musical grandfather Ockeghem than to his musical father Josquin, I think, in that his music proceeds seamlessly, usually without the voices reaching the ends of their phrases in synchrony until the very end of a piece.

His music feels to me something like lapidary, except that lapidary is two-dimensional whereas music is three-dimensional, like looking down into a pool of fish swimming at different levels. His "roughness" of interplay of the voices is often commented on. That doesn't disturb me, since I love cross-relations. The "roughness", I'd say, helps to affirm the independence of the voices. The result is an unusual, uncompromising, and beautiful interplay of voices. At the end of pieces, one can feel the final resolution approaching, but when it actually arrives, its beauty is unearthly, even though one saw it coming, exactly IMV because the voices have been so independent up till they swim together at that point. He seems to have a thousand ways in his hand to bring together those final resolutions, so every one is different.