Recordings
Henry, Derrick
Recordings LISTENING & DANCING RECREATING RENAISSANCE MUSIC I arrived HOME exhausted, in want of some light yet invigorating entertainment. Renaissance dance music seemed just the thing. And so I...
...It appears Ferdinand Conrad's did...
...Tielman Susato's Hoboecken Dance (which incidentally bears no kinship, as one overly ambitious scholar proclaimed, to the city in New Jersey) as a lively, yet lilting dance, while Clemencic-with the assistance of piquant crumhorns, tangy percussion, and his own vir-tuosic, embellished recorder line-invests it with great swagger...
...Walter Gerwig, lute...
...Shortly into the second disc, pangs of d'eja vu struck: Hadn't I just heard this...
...Whereas Conrad might delicately vary the instrumentation from one section of a dance to another (strings and winds might alternate, or percussion might be added), Clemencic, presumably to stimulate his listeners, changes color-sometimes radically-at every opportunity, even from phrase to phrase...
...Since the chances of one group fortuitously arriving at the same ordering of more than twenty dances are virtually nil, one naturally wonders which recording came first...
...Specific instrumentation is almost never indicated for ensemble dances, nor are such niceties as dynamics and articulation...
...DERRICK HENRY...
...Conrad conceives * Quintessence PMC 7088...
...Ferdinand Conrad, recorder and crumhorn...
...Each is thoroughly delightful in its own right...
...Clemencic plays it briskly, with a full consort of strings, winds, and regal...
...Both recordings still sound well: the Musical Heritage Society issue is crisper, more firmly focused, the Quintessence warmer but not so well miked (the solo recorder appears far too close...
...And in so doing, they provide the listener with a deeper understanding of the problems presented, the choices involved, and the creativity demanded in turning the skimpy notation of these four-hundred-year-old dances into living music...
...Oboes and horns, instruments which existed only in primitive forms in the Renaissance and early Baroque and which consequently played no part in art music, would thus not make appropriate modern choices either...
...As it turned out, indeed I had...
...Renaissance Dance Music from collections by Moderne, Susato, Gervaise, Phalese, Franck, Hassler, Attaignant, and Demantius...
...Yet the performances could scarcely be more different...
...Thus it is not a matter of insecurity when I strongly urge acquisition of both albums...
...Both contemporary treatises, such as Thoinot Arbeau's Orchesography (1588), and modern commentaries, such as Mabel Dolmetsch's books, invariably concentrate on how this music was danced rather than on how it was played...
...Great freedom is therefore granted the twentieth-century performer, and, for all we know, may have been granted his Renaissance counterparts...
...Those interested in pursuing these and other performance problems in more detail could find no better place to begin than the lavishly illustrated pages of the superb British journal Early Music...
...For example, Conrad performs...
...And so I happened to pull out two recent reissues...
...Musical Heritage Society MHS 3938...
...In dances which clearly form a pair, such as Melchior Franck's Pavane and Galliard and Susato's Ronde et Saltarello, Conrad maintains the same scoring for both, whereas Clemencic's component parts, no matter how persuasive in their own right, appear curiously unrelated...
...Otto Steinfopf, dulcian...
...Conrad adopts a moderate tempo and uses only a small string ensemble, achieving a performance that is elegant and genuinely moving...
...Sometimes Conrad's version proves more satisfying, sometimes Clemencic's...
...Of course there are certain guidelines to follow...
...Reconstructing this material-uncomplicated Franco-Flemish dances from the mid-sixteenth century on side 1, more stylized and polyphonic dances on side 2 (Attaignant lute arrangements from 1529, German works from c. 1600)-in an historically "authentic" manner is no simple matter...
...Use Brix-Meinert, Ulrich Koch, and Gunther Lemmen, viola da braccio...
...His Quintessence program, previously available in this country on RCA Victrola, was taped by Sudwest-Tonstudio Jansen, Stuttgart in December, 1961.* My information on the Clemencic duplication is not so precise-Musical Heritage Society merely informs me that it derives from a Harmonia Mundi master dating back at least a decade...
...His tempos are generally moderate, his forces modest (the standard texture is strings plus recorder), his ornamentation reserved, Clemencic concerns himself with entertainment...
...not only that, but they are presented in exactly the same order...
...certain "loud" instruments such as shawms have no place in this context...
...But the important issue is not who imitated whom, but rather how and why these performances differ...
...sometimes both are equally attractive...
...Conrad and Clemencic adopt vastly dissimilar attitudes toward the recreation of this dance repertory...
...If we are performing for an actual dance (and even the more elaborate pieces on these discs were almost certainly intended to be danced to), then the tempos must logically be appropriate to the proper execution of the dance in question...
...If I prefer the Conrad album overall it is because he never loses touch with the essentially functional nature of this music, and because his string, lute, and recorder versions of the more stylized German dances seem so much more in keeping with their intrinsic nature than do Clemencic's lavishly scored, strongly accented readings...
...Clemencic Consort of Vienna...
...I knew that if there were ever a perfect opportunity to compare divergent attitudes toward the realization of Renaissance dance music, this was it...
...They offer the unusual opportunity to make endlessly fascinating comparisons between strikingly different performances of identical Renaissance dance selections...
...The resulting disparities in character are often startling...
...his program as one that might actually be danced in a smallish room...
...he quite reasonably assumes that most people will buy his album for listening, not as music for dancing...
...Similar analyses could be made of the parallel performances of each piece...
...Both Clemencic and Conrad are sensitive to these problems of orchestration, and their ensembles employ modern copies of period instruments that might conceivably have been used to perform this music...
...Nor would trumpets, which through the Baroque era were capable of a simple diatonic scale only in their highest octave or "clarino" register, and moreover were the special province of the military and royalty and hence off-limits for ordinary social functions...
...Or consider the Demantius Galliard...
...We thus have very thorough information about such dance steps and movements, but precious little pertaining to such musical issues as tempo, orchestration, and ornamentation...
...But the special value of these discs lies in their unique relationship to one another...
...Johannes Koch and Heinrich Haferland, viola da gamba...
...Upon closer inspection it became apparent that these records contain the identical pieces...
...DERRICK HENRY...
...If we are performing indoors, then the orchestration must naturally be relatively intimate...
...Rene Clemencic, director...
...His fast tempos are consequently faster than Conrad's, his slow tempos slower, his ornamentation more lavish, his phrasing freer and accents heavier, his orchestration larger and louder...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 4
