Josquin dez Prez: Missa Faisant Regretz; Motets

Josquin Desprez (Composer), Walter Frye (Composer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Composer: Josquin Desprez, Walter Frye
• Audio CD (March 26, 2002)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Gaudeamus
• ASIN: B00005Y0NF
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #281,575 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Tu solus qui facis mirabilia, motet for 4 parts

2. Domine, non secundum peccata nostra, motet for 4 parts

3. Ave verum corpus, motet for 3 parts

4. O Domine Jesu Christe, motet for 4 parts

5. Christum ducem, motet for 4 parts (6th part of motet cycle 'Qui velatus facie')

6. Tout a par moy (from das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, Folio 252)

7. Missa 'Faisant Regretz,' for four parts: Kyrie

8. Missa 'Faisant Regretz,' for four parts: Gloria

9. Missa 'Faisant Regretz,' for four parts: Credo

10. Missa 'Faisant Regretz,' for four parts: Sanctus & Benedictus

11. Missa 'Faisant Regretz,' for four parts: Agnus Dei

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfection, Pure and Simple!, November 7, 2008

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Josquin dez Prez: Missa Faisant Regretz; Motets (Audio CD)

The weather must have been as fine as the first day of Creation in West Wratting, England, on the 14th-16th of March, 2001. The air must have been clean of all pollution and pollen. Nothing else can explain the cerulean clarity of the six voices on this recording, all six voices as pure and bright as sunlight through stained glass. The Clerks' Group is always good, but this CD is transcendently good, the best performance of music by Josquin I've ever heard. It should be enshrined for all choirs and vocal ensembles as the template of how Renaissance polyphony should be sung.

Josquin's Missa Faisant Regretz is a small mass, only 20 minutes in length, constructed entirely on a four-note theme - E>C<D>B in various transpositions - taken from the earlier chanson by Walter Frye, titled Tout a par Moy. That chanson is recorded here also, and it's a splendid example of the changes in polyphonic composition, to hear the exuberant but meandering chanson followed by Josquin's elegantly concise and tighly shaped mass. The phrase "faisant regretz" - "feeling regret" - comes from the middle of Frye's chanson, and sets the tenor of the mass as penitential, but the most confidently optimistic penitence you'll ever hear.

The other forty minutes of this recording are devoted to five motets by Josquin, from the collection "Motetti de Passione - B" printed in 1503 in Venice by Ottaviano Petrucci, the 'Gutenberg' of music. Petrucci's Odhecaton was the first publication of music printed from movable type; without Petrucci, it's fair to say that we'd be poorer by dozens of compositions by Josquin and his great contemporaries. Petrucci was not only an artisan but also a marketing genius. His music publications, of which 61 have survived, were not intended to compete with the sumptuous illuminated manuscripts collected by the super-wealthy, but rather to be sold to the rising bourgeoisie, for domestic performance by skilled dilettantes, both singers and instrumentalists. Thus the motets chosen for Motetti A and Motetti B, including many by Josquin, are musically distinct in idiom from the masses. They are more homophonic (composed of harmonies in rhythmic unison or near unison) and more 'accessible' to untrained music lovers, then and now. That's not to say they are musically inferior. In some ways, Josquin's use of homophony is ahead of his era -- emotionally potent and direct, a herald of the ideals of the early Baroque. 20th C musicologists once upon a time supposed that such 'simple' compositions must have been early works by Josquin, while he was still learning his craft. That wasn't so, as anyone who HEARS this music sung with the supreme artistry of the Clerks' Group will immediately realize, even if the listener is musically illiterate. Josquin, of all Renaissance composers, could write great music in any form and any style he chose.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A crying shame....., October 28, 2011

By 

Adriano Hundhausen (Brno) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Josquin dez Prez: Missa Faisant Regretz; Motets (Audio CD)

is what this CD really is. It gives us essential repertoire by one of the greatest composers in our Western tradition, and the Clerks' Group, led by Edward Wickham, is clearly composed of wonderful musicians who are truly at home in this repertoire. But all of their efforts, to my mind, are marred by their choice of recording venue and sound engineer.

Let me put it this way: What would you make of a Haydn string quartet performed and recorded right smack in the transept of Chartres cathedral? While it might still be recognizable as a Haydn string quartet, you would be unable to hear any of the subtleties that Haydn put into the work, no matter how much the performers slowed it down to compensate for the cathedral's cavernous, echoing acoustic. Well here the Clerks' Group make the opposite mistake.

Josquin's sacred music, even his most elaborate, was still written for performance in vaulted churches and chapels, mostly stone by the late 15th century. When performed in those spaces, the music is grand and sonorous even with only one singer on a part. But the Clerks' Group have inexplicably chosen to record this gorgeous music in a space less resonant than my cat's litter box. Really. I mean, perhaps their recording engineer, David Wright, has been unkind to St. Andrew's Church, West Wratting, but personally I have never been in a Medieval church with an acoustic anywhere NEAR as muffled as the sound on this disk.

Sustaining the long melodic lines in Josquin's music is difficult enough for a one-voice-per-part group like the Clerks in ANY venue, but this acoustic forces these wonderful singers into some bad interpretive choices. I too might be tempted to take some passages too fast were I singing in that space. In addition, the Clerks - particularly their lower voices - have developed a sort of bouncing, staccato way of phrasing their lines which adds interest to their dry sound, but makes Josquin's music sound distressingly jerky at times. Need I say that I don't like my Josquin jerky?

There are two very good continental ensembles currently working towards complete cycles of Josquin's masses - De Labyrintho in Vicenza and the Ensemble Metamorphoses in Lille/Calais. If you want to hear these pieces, I recommend that you wait until one of those groups gets around to recording them.