Various Artists, The Medieval Experience (Archiv, 1996)
Venere Lute Quartet, Sweet Division (Lute Society of America, 2003)
As a disclaimer before beginning this review, I need to say that I took on the task of listening to and reviewing two collections of music from the Middle Ages out of curiosity as to what "the Medieval experience" actually entails in the musical sense, and not out of any particular expertise in the genre. Therefore, this review is aimed more at people who, like myself, are novices to the styles of music played on these discs.
The Medieval Experience is a four-disc collection of songs, originally recorded at different times in the Seventies by a number of different musical groups. This collection covers a broad range of mostly religious songs. Despite the rather presumptuous title, secular music is a little too underrepresented to suggest that the listener is experiencing the full spectrum of Medieval music. Still, the performers involved do a fine job singing difficult material, and the music gives the listener some sense of what sounds could be heard in the churches, abbeys, and courts of the Middle Ages.
I augmented my personal Medieval experience with Sweet Division, a recently made album performed by the Venere Lute Quartet under the sponsorship of the Lute Society of America. Sweet Division explores the instrumental side of Renaissance music, delving into and expanding on a very limited amount of existing source material arranged specifically for lute consorts.
On both collections, the performances are impeccable, at least as far as I could tell. My major gripes with both collections stem not from the actual music, but from the way the music is presented. In The Medieval Experience, styles that do not really go together well are juxtaposed, and one of the discs in particular is overly lengthy. By contrast, the Venere Lute Quartet present an album of ideal length in Sweet Division, but try to do a little too much in the limited time frame.
The first two discs of The Medieval Experience celebrate the songs of "Monks and Troubadours." Naturally, the songs of the monks are Gregorian chants, performed by the Benedictine monks of Münsterschwarzach in Germany on the first CD and those of the Notre-Dame de Fontgombault Abbey in France on the second. The chants on the first CD come from a Palm Sunday mass, while the second CD contains chants originally performed for the dedication of a church. Stylistically, there are no surprises here; the chants are serene religious hymns sung in unison and in Latin by a group of monks in a chamber heavy with echo.
The troubadour songs, which date back to the thirteenth and fourteenth century, are performed by The Early Music Consort of London. Each piece features two or three male singers, with some light instrumental accompaniment. Some of these songs feature countertenors singing in falsetto; it is possible that their parts were originally written for castrato singers. The instrumentation varies from song to song. Some of the songs feature horns such as a cornet, some feature the shawm, and some are driven along by plucked string instruments like the lute or the mandora. These songs tend to be lively, dynamic, and secular, and are structured more similarly to contemporary songs than the chants are.
Both types of song are performed well and work on their own terms, but the intermingling of the somber, devout chants with the bouncy, jovial troubadour songs on both CD's makes for a jarring contrast. I unsuccessfully tried to suppress a cartoonish mental image of a small band of troubadours in tights crashing a very serious prayer service in a Medieval monastery. The troubadours would keep getting thrown out by increasingly violent means, only to sneak back in and wreak more havoc. I can understand wanting to break the monotony of the chants over an hour-long CD, but the two styles of song would have been better served by both having their own separate disc.
The third disc, "Motets," is performed by the male vocal group Pro Cantone Antiqua, with some additional brass backing from the Hamburger Bläserkreis Für Alte Musik and the London Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble. The songs on this disc date from the fifteenth century. All are sung in Latin, and most are religious hymns. The high falsetto of the male countertenor dominates the vocal arrangements, at least on the first few listens. This will likely sound unnatural, and perhaps even unnerving, to those who do not know what to expect. However, no small amount of skill is required to sing these parts with the clarity and projection demonstrated here. Furthermore, some of the pieces, especially John Dunstable's "Preco Preheminencie (The Herald Preceded the Prince)," are quite moving.
The same group of performers sings the "Masses and Memorials" on the fourth disc. All of these songs are Latin religious pieces dating to the fifteenth century. The first five pieces were composed by Josquin Desprez for a mass in honor of "l'homme armé," or the soldier. Johannes Ockeghem composed the next five pieces for a funeral mass. The final piece, ironically, was composed by Desprez as a lament for Ockeghem on his death in 1497. Not surprisingly, the songs here are sad and mournful, and the singing very emotional. The only really uplifting point on the disc occurs in the "Hosanna in excelsis" part of Desprez' "Sanctus." Once again, I have more problems with the way the disc is compiled than I do with the actual performances. The other three discs were long enough at an hour, but the saddest and heaviest of the four runs a grueling, interminable seventy-five minutes.
While the Medieval Experience collection covers songs from the Renaissance, Sweet Division presents an assortment of instrumental tunes performed by a modern lute consort called the Venere Lute Quartet. This quartet consists of Gail Gillespie on soprano lute, Douglas Freundlich on alto and soprano lute, Christopher Morrongiello on tenor and alto lute, and Phillip Rukavina on bass lute. Only 150 pieces composed specifically for lute consorts remain in existence. On Sweet Division, the Venere Lute Quartet performs some tunes from this limited source material, and also adapts other Renaissance musical pieces to the lute quartet format. Comprising one fifty-minute CD, Sweet Division is more easily digestible than any of the four discs of The Medieval Experience, and very pleasant on the whole. Fans of both classical and folk styles of guitar playing will enjoy the sound of this album, especially if they relish intricate interplay between plucked stringed instruments. To me, the roots of classical music can be heard in the structure of the tunes to a greater degree than the roots of contemporary folk music can, although the consort briefly and tantalizingly breaks into a happy little jig towards the end of the penultimate track "The Maypole." As with The Medieval Experience, it was impossible for my untrained ear to find fault with any of the performances, but I felt the material on the disc could have been presented better. The Venere Lute Quartet performs twenty-nine pieces in fifty minutes, with only a handful of pieces exceeding two minutes in length. Perhaps Sweet Division would have been improved by taking the best fifteen pieces, and fleshing out and extending the arrangements so that the individual melodies would linger more in the listener's memory.
All told, while I cannot really say how favorably the performances on The Medieval Experience and Sweet Division compare to similar works by other groups, I can say that they serve as acceptable introductions to the genre of Medieval music for the inquisitive listener. Most people will know what to expect from the Gregorian chants, but otherwise these discs will open a lot of doors for further exploration. In addition, people looking for period music for a theatrical presentation or something along those lines will find a broad spectrum of Medieval musical styles to choose from. I can't help thinking, though, that these discs only hint at the full breadth of the Medieval experience of music.
