Customer Reviews

Paul McCreesh: Venetian Vespers

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A surprising collection of five CDs all turning around one small historical period, the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century, around a few composers, Monteverdi and Gabrieli mostly. It starts at once with the style we know as Paul McCreesh's. A luminous suspension of the music and of the sentences, an internal and contained joy, a dense and optimistic serenity. A reservation and elevation that could be sad though made of confidence, trust, faithfulness, dedication, selflessness and total abandon to God. Yet this style is going to change little by little. On the first CD the certitude the music makes us share is that the path we have chosen is the right one and the destination is just the only one we could target, our Jerusalem. Any doubt is impossible and is just pushed aside by some glorious assertion of the future that is a future of triumph in God and glory in heaven. But Gabrieli in the third CD is going to knock on our door, knock on the gate to that path of certain glory and that knocking is definitely introducing a different tone. Three times three knocks. That's the beast knocking on the door, the beast that has to turn the Christian trinity into some Solomon's number and then the apocalyptic beast that is the promise of the end of this world and the coming of the Messianic Jerusalem. But will the final part of this promise ever be held? From that moment the tone becomes somber, very somber, dark and strained. It is no longer confidence but submission, trust but enslavement and the fifth CD with Gabrieli's Music for San Rocco (1608) brings the triumph of this tone. Solemn sadness nearly sinister or even maybe bleak. It is no longer a chant or a song or some rejoicing but only and exclusively a dirge, a lamentation, a mourning plaintive humdrum at times entombment and the wind instruments are like the trumpets of the angels, they are opening the gates of hell onto earth. And we have to submit, to accept, to crouch in front of this everlasting and overpowering force. The music is highly creative but always in that line and McCreesh's style of suspended conducting, of aerial mid-air hesitation gives to that message the force of a massage, of a rollercoaster taking us into an infernal ride. Even the Alleluia of track sixteen becomes a crushing experience, like some mockery of joy, some self-satisfied and self-justified submission to a fate that is so dense, so thick that we nearly can't breathe in that atmosphere. The final Magnificat and the Sonata preceding it could have been gayer and happier but that clear triumphant tone is nearly immediately turned into that crushing humility that makes us be nothing in the hand or should I say the hands of God, the left hand knowing nothing about what the right hand is giving and the right hand knowing nothing about what the left hand is taking. Life is an apocalypse and we have to roll into a ball into the flowing fateful flux of this destruction that may bring some kind of resurrection. But do we still believe in that last step of the divine process?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

No collection of early Italien sacred music is complete without this wonderful and truly inspiring recording. This is a milestone recording -
one of immense beauty, fire, colour and searing honesty but most importantly, one of unpretentious interpretation. HEAVEN ON EARTH