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GRAMOPHONE (06/2017)
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GCDP32113



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Reviewer: Fabrice Fitch

While not exactly a revelation (given its audible debt to Ensemble Organum), Graindelavoix’s recent recording of Machaut’s Mass was vocally superlative and integrated within a very strong programme. But this latest enterprise brings back to mind everything that’s problematic about Björn Schmelzer’s enterprise. Orazio Vecchi’s Requiem was published in Antwerp in 1612. Schmelzer proposes that the work was performed at the obsequies of Peter Paul Rubens in the same city nearly 30 years later. He doesn’t disclose his reasoning sufficiently for proper evaluation, but the rest of the programme consists of isolated Mass movements also published in Antwerp over a 60‑year period: it seems that the raison d’être of the Rubens connection is a lengthy disquisition on Baroque aesthetics whose pertinence to these specific works one isn’t inclined to take on trust, and which do little in any case to illuminate Graindelavoix’s performances.

Those performances are themselves not quite the finished article, though there’s no denying that the sound in itself is very seductive, especially with the full ensemble. Vecchi’s lengthy, double-choir ‘Dies irae’ ought to be the programme’s centrepiece, but a countertenor of unreliable tone quality and more uncertain intonation cuts the grass clean under it (the tuning of the top voices generally is hit-and-miss). Given the solemnity of the occasion for which polyphonic Requiems were intended, one might question how much ornamentation would have been considered appropriate, but the predictability of Graindelavoix’s embellishments reduce them to a collection of interpretative tics. My interest picked up for the excerpts of George de La Hèle’s Missa Praeter rerum seriem, but the concluding Agnus Dei by Duarte Lobo marks the return of a tenor voice that I’d (not) missed in the group’s most recent recordings (my earlier comparison with Liam Gallagher wasn’t meant as a compliment). At least no one could accuse Graindelavoix of leaving you indifferent.

 

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