CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Sacred Music (Master Works)      

Orlandus Lassus: Music for Holy Week and Easter Sunday, Requiem in four parts

Bruno Turner, Mark Brown, directors

Pro Cantione Antiqua

========= from the cover ==========

As a composer of masses, Lassus has indeed been overshadowed in recent times by the towering figure of Palestrina. The large majority of the Flemish master's compositions in this field remain unfamiliar to all but a few scholars, although his reputation was unequalled in the sixteenth century. Mostly these works fall into the category of parody masses, that is to say works whose themes are based on the melody of a previous composition, sacred or secular, from the composer's own hand or from that of another. The Requiem Mass for four voices, first published in 1578, has as its point of departure, however, the plainchant for the Office of the Dead, not always as a direct quotation, but at its most obvious in the Introitus, where the second voice sings the chant as a cantus firmus, a fairly uncommon formal device in the work of Lassus, but one which foreshadows the solemnity of the music that follows.

The four-part Requiem is indeed for much of its duration a slow, dark and serious piece. It is written with rather unusual clefs, so that the voices are deep and lie close together, in a register well suited to the several bass and tenor singers specially imported from the Low Countries to sing with Lassus in the Bavarian Chapel. Even the intonations to the polyphonic passages are written at an unusually low pilch.

One should not gather from this, however, that this is a gloomy or monotonous composition. As a variation, in the Gradual - here replaced by a setting of Si ambulem in media umbrae mortis (Psalm 23) - the sonority of the four-part polyphony gives way to a fairly extended section ('Virga tua ..') of two-part writing for the lower voices. The Benedictus is a trio for the upper parts. Above all, the brief but exalted rising phrase in the Hosanna of the Benedictus, on the words 'In excelsis', echoed twice in the Communio on the words 'In aeternum', are the expression not of mortality and suffering but of unshakeablc faith in the Resurrection.

In order better to recreate the atmosphere of a Requiem Mass, we have included plainchant from the Office for the Dead: the Tractus 'Absolve Domine ...". the Sequentia 'Dies irac", and finally the 'In paradisum'. a particularly moving antiphon from the Burial Service which brings the Mass to a fittingly still and contemplative conclusion.

- Mark Brown