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GRAMOPHONE (08/2012)
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Hyperion
CDA67933
0034571179339
(ID271)
Reviewer: Caroline Gill
Measured acoustic for Brabant portrait
of Willaert’s teacher
One of the most satisfying things about watching and listening to the
Brabant Ensemble evolve over the last decade has been to hear its sound
become more and more easily identifiable: as with, say, The Sixthen, a few
bars will usually be enough. But whereas with some groups that identity
comes only from the sound, the Brabants can have an attribution pinned on
them as much by the beauty of their phrasing. The way in which Stephen Rice
moulds his musical arguments is uniquely detailed and quietly thoughtful,
aided at least in part by the fact that this respected musicologist works
from his own specially produced editions (although this does beg the
question directly to him: where have the delicious false relations in
Nesciens mater gone?).
Being led so unobtrusively through the musical maze of the pieces on this disc in this way completely avoids the risk so common to single-composer discs of the slightly obscure polyphony: the music never becomes boring and the sound, which is at its most crystalline in one-to-a-part performance and which sometimes teeters on the edge of sounding too big with this 16-voice group, never hardens into relentlessness but stays luminously beautiful throughout. The blend of the ensemble is too warm for that, too — especially when Rice has opted for an acoustic that is yielding but not as distractingly swimmy as the chapel of Merton College that many Oxford-based groups can sometimes misguidedly choose.
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