Customer Reviews

Polyphonie Aquitaine of th 12th Century

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This CD, containing a selection of 12th century French church choral music, is a good buy. The general style of the music is similar to that of the recently popular Gregorian chants, but with a greater variety of arrangements. The recording includes works for choir, solo voice and duets (all male), and solo organ.

The recording is clear and crisp and the program notes are informative. The Latin text of the music is translated in the notes, however the translation is in French.

I'm not asking about your CD-player and speakers or whether you have the opportunity hear hear chanting live. I'm wondering about your state of mind and degree of focus when you hear chant, either live or recorded. How you listen will greatly affect what you hear. The chanting monks of the 12th Century ostensibly heard their own endless daily chanting as simultaneously an act of contrition and a prayer for redemption of the whole human community for which they were the select intercessors. They were chanting as surrogates for you and me. One has to suspect, however, that some of them, perhaps most of them, were conscious of the physical allure, the worldly beauty of music. Thus they learned to sing artfully, and justified their art as "pleasing to God". Enchanted by audible beauty, they elaborated, enhanced, ornamented the daily chants that were their penitential duty. They invented "music for music's sake" as we know it. The Church was always uncomfortably with such artistic singing; time after time, over the centuries from the 12th to the 20th, the Catholic Church and later its protesting offspring tried to restrict music to its merest religious function, to strip it of its human ostentation and artistic aspiration. "Music", I'm glad to say, always survived.

And what do modern listeners hear in Christian chant? So-called plainchant or Gregorian chant? What, for instance, did worldwide audiences listen for, a few decades ago, when CDs of chanting by the monks of an obscure Spanish monastery became "pop" sensations? Meditative relaxation? Spiritual aura? Refuge from modern anxiety? Me? I hear the music, since that's what I listen for. I'm not a spiritual seeker; in a way, I envy both the monks and the spiritually-motivated listeners for the exaltation they may experience in chant. Nevertheless, it's the powerful urge to make human music that I listen to and hear, and therefore I tend to evaluate the musical artistry of any chanters more than their state of spiritual bliss.

The chanters of Ensemble Organum in 1984, when this CD of Aquitanian chant was released, were aspiring musicians, professionally trained. This was the first recording by Ensemble Organum, directed by Marcel Pérès. There have been more than two dozen subsequent recordings of chant and other Medieval genres of music from Ensemble Organum, a few of them secular, since 1984. This CD, and the musicological notions advanced by Pérès then and since, bowled the Early Music community over and knocked the 'Gregorian Chant' community on its ear. Everything Ensemble Organum did was instantly controversial. Eventually Pérès replaced his conservatory-trained classical voices with singers from 'traditional' music environments, chiefly from Corsica. The reaction from those who hear chant primarily as Music was not enthusiastic. But Pérès processes to his own bells. He's an experimenter and innovator. Sometimes he hits,sometimes he misses, in terms of artistry, but then one senses that simple artistry is never his goal. So then, what is his goal? Is it intellectual or spiritual, or both?

The Ensemble Organum of 1984 include five chanters and Pérès himself on organ. Of those five singers, four became MAJOR stars in the constellation of Early Music. Male alto Gérard Lesne became one of the finest soloists of Italina and French Baroque, as well as director of the superb ensemble Il Seminario Musicale. Countertenor Dominique Vellard also became a superstar of the baroque repertoire, singing 17th/18th C opera. Tenor Josep Benet and baritone Josep Cabre went on to prominent careers specializing in late Renaissance polyphony, particularly of the Spanish Golden Age. They still collaborate in the ensembles La Colombina and Capilla Peñaflorida, and their names show up on scores of recordings, post-Organum.

The singing is gorgeous on this CD, which is available in several formats and which is an essential item in any collection of chant recordings. The notes that accompany the CD are replete with info about San Martial de Limoges that you'll only find interesting after you hear the performance. How you choose to listen to this chant, obviously, is up to you alone.

I really like this recording. I am not an expert in Early Music, but I do remember being introduced to it in an old recording of Perotin. The music sounded so unusual, mystical and masculine that I just loved it. Upon looking at newer recordings they just didn't seem to have that sense of masculine mysticism. The interpretation style is usually very fluid and slow and seems to not accent what I think early polyphony is built upon---parallel lines of fourths or fifths which give me a sensation of otherworldliness. This recording, however, has a sense of sacred power and mysticism that is created by those fifths, rich masculine voices and a tempo that is not too slow. The voices are great and the higher voice is taken up not by a woman, but by Gerard Lesne, a fabulous countertenor with a very rich voice, not thin and weak at all. I can really see how knights, princes and monks would listen to this. If they sang this at church I would probably go everyday.

Astounding harmonies, hypnotic, restful, great echo. I bought this as part of a boxed set and found myself listening to "Aquitane" to the exclusion of the other material. There is something comforting and familiar and strangely accessible. The fourth hymn, "O Primus Homo Coruit," has a particularly appealing melody and engages the mystical in a way comparable to gazing at an elaborate stained glass window. "Jube Domine, Puis Lecture: Primo Tempore" will remind some of the scene in Monty Python & the Holy Grail when the monks chant and strike themselves with their Bibles. I like the first five selections best. Often play as I drift off to sleep.

This little donkey is so expensive that it doesn't matter what's on it. Only millionaires or those who have more important stuff to spend their money on, no matter how devoted to great music one may be, will ever hear it. Was this the intention of the Divine Christ, as more than adequately and directly stated in the Sermon on the Mount?? Give what thou hast then, and follow Him! Is this sentiment not what is the message expressed in as many beautiful harmonies, nay, polyphonies, as are here sung? Then, do we listen to sound without meaning? Are we as infants, babbling and hearing but babble? Take your money then and spend to heal and succor the afflicted of the war zones and terrible proliferating slums of this heartless world, and not on this guilded donkey, that you may not be shamed when your day comes.