Customer Reviews

Vaet: Missa Ego flos campi

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This is Cinquecento's fourth disc since their formation in 2006, and in their short career so far I have become a big fan. Like the Brabant Ensemble, they are unearthing some little-known but very beautiful music from the 16th century, and this is another beauty.

Stephen Rice (director of the Brabant Ensemble) claims in his excellent notes that Vaet would undoubtedly have been among the best-known composers of the 16th century if he had not died young. Perhaps that's a slightly overblown claim, but he was a very fine composer and I thought his were the outstanding works on Cinquecento's disc of Music for the Court of Maximilian II Music for the Court of Maximilian II. The music here is beautiful, dramatic in places and extremely skilfully constructed, and there is no doubt that Vaet deserves to be heard much more widely.

Cinquecento bring their characteristic empathy and beauty of sound to the music. An all-male ensemble, they sing in the Flemish tradition of lower pitch and record in a resonant acoustic which produces a fabulous, rich sound but never obscures the individual lines. Intonation is impeccable, the balance and blend of the voices is perfect, and they show a fine understanding of the relationship between music and text. I found the whole disc a huge pleasure, just as I have with all their previous discs. (Their recording of Regnart is a particular favourite of mine.)

The recorded sound by Hyperion is excellent and the notes are interesting and informative. It's an excellent disc, recommended very warmly.

This CD is a standout among standouts! Having now heard all six of Cinquecento's CDs thus far released -- and any of them would make a fine purchase -- I must assert that this one is very fine indeed. While the performance and production values of each release have been equally strong, what makes this one exceptional is the high quality of Vaet's writing. I particularly enjoy the textural variety in his writing and inspired flow of his melodies and harmonies. His brief Miserere is intensely beautiful -- my favorite moment on any of Cinquecento's CDs. And their rendition of Clemens non Papa's motet, "Ego Flos Campi" (used masterfully by Vaet in his parody mass) is the best performance I have yet heard of Clemens.

The notes to this CD assert that "Jacobus Vaet would undoubtedly be among the best-known composers of the sixteenth century had he not died at the age of about thirty-seven." Now, that's a bold hyperbole, and one that I `took with a grain of salt' -- more like a whole tablespoon of salt! -- until I listened to the first track on this recording, Vaet's six-voice motet Antevenis Virides. Now I need to revise that hyperbole ... upwards! Vaet was undoubtedly among the BEST composers of the sixteenth century, known or unknown! This CD makes the case that Vaet's early death, after a career of just fifteen years, was a tragedy for Music equal to the premature deaths of Pergolesi, Mozart, and Schubert.

Since Vaet is so little-known, I've condensed some info from the article about him on wikipedia: Jacobus Vaet's first appearance in the historical record is from Kortrijk, where he was admitted in 1543, at age 13, as a singer to the church of Onze Lieve. In 1547 he was enrolled at the University of Leuven, and by 1550 he was in the court of Charles V, where he was listed as tenor in the chapel choir. He became Kapellmeister to Maximilian II in 1554, and held that post for the rest of his lamentably short life. Evidently Maximilian was fond of his Kapellmeister, and mourned him both in his diary, and by having elegies written for him by other prominent composers in his circle.
Vaet's influences included Nicolas Gombert, his friend Clemens non Papa, and Orlande de Lassus, whose style he often imitated. Vaet used cross-relations to a degree rare at the time; sometimes they are even simultaneous, resulting in dissonant clashes. Vaet also sometimes ended compositions on minor triads; ending on a minor chord was a relative rarity before the late 16th century. Another peculiarity of his style was a liking for progressions based on the circle of fifths, as well as dominant-tonic cadences, both features which foreshadow the changes in music which were to come at the end of the century. His use of circle-of-fifths progressions may be an influence from Lassus; it is also a feature of Spanish polyphony of the period, and as a member of the chapel of Charles V, and later Maximilian II, he may have been familiar with the music of Spaniards such as Guerrero, who wrote in a similar idiom and also worked for Maximilian.
Even more unusual than his pungent cross-relations was his liking for quotation and parody. He was the first to write a Missa quodlibetica, a five-voice mass which was a series of quodlibets--simultaneous presentations of several familiar tunes, from both sacred and secular sources. Vaet wrote nine complete masses which have survived, including a setting of the Requiem. His surviving motets are both sacred and secular, and he also wrote eight settings each of the Magnificat and the Marian antiphon Salve Regina.

"Cinquecento" has selected eight of Vaet's motets to accompany his Mass Ego Flos Campi, plus the 7-voice Ego Flos Campi by Jacob Clemens which provided the cantus firmus for Vaet's mass. There's an astonishing variety of affect in these motets, and an effervescence of musical ideas. The piquant dissonances and quick shifts of rhythm certainly distinguish Vaet from the orthodox polyphonists of his generation, and make his music more intriguing. His style really is quite comparable to that of Francisco Guerrero's Latin motets, yet Vaet manages to sound more modern ... if you suppose, as I do, that `modern' means anything after 1600.

Cinquecento is an all-male vocal ensemble based in Austria but including singers from Germany, Netherlands, and Britain. They're among the best, as you'll hear on any of the recordings of Willaert, de Monte, Regnart, or `Music for the Court of Maximilian II'. The performance of this repertoire is all about independence of phrasing -- linear, rhetorical, sentence-like -- and of course about polished ensemble techniques: attacks and releases, expressive attention to dissonances and consonances, `transparency' achieved through the independent dynamics of each line, and balance of timbres such that the highest voices don't overshadow the inner and lower voices. Those are the skills that make Cinquecento excellent.

A meticulously well performed and very, very well-produced and recorded CD. If you are interested in early choral music, this is a delight.