Music
JAMES, HIBBARD
MUSIC By Hibbard James Primitive' Music Now Sophisticated JAMES The first concert this season of the New York Pro Musica An-tiqua once again put me in mind of a long-held theory of musical...
...The Pro Musica Antiqua singers and instrumentalists, who have attracted an increasingly more enthusiastic following each year since 1952, have devoted themselves to early music, particularly of the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods...
...My feeling has been that taste has a tendency to bend back on itself, so that a listener who reaches a post-Bartok stage of sophistication may well find himself seeking out musical forms that he would have scorned in that stage of his musical development when he thought the acme of orchestral writing was The Sorcerer's Apprentice...
...All their recordings show a wonderful understanding of the style of the music, which they communicate to the listener by the beautiful sensitivity of the instrumental playing (they use the instruments specified by the composers, many of them specially manufactured), and by the peculiarly bloodless tone of the singing...
...MUSIC By Hibbard James Primitive' Music Now Sophisticated JAMES The first concert this season of the New York Pro Musica An-tiqua once again put me in mind of a long-held theory of musical taste...
...If you want to test the theory I mentioned earlier, try this experiment: Listen to one of the opera recordings I mentioned two weeks ago (say, Renata Tebaldi in Turandot) . After you've steeped yourself for a while in the complex scoring for the instruments and the bravura singing, put on something like Claudio Monteverdi's II Ballo delta Ingrate in the Vanguard series...
...After the lush orchestration and complex writing of some of the operas I have been hearing lately, the music of the early Flemish masters offered at the Pro Musica concert (it has not yet been recorded) is so transparent in its use of simple harmonies as to have all the effect of daring novelty...
...Among New York Pro Musica Antiqua records, my favorite is an early release, the Vocal Music of Monteverdi (Columbia LP-5159), but there is not much to choose between that and their latest, Medieval Music of Court and Countryside (Decca DL 9400...
...If baroque music is to your liking, you will want to look into a series recently put out by Vanguard called Masterpieces of Italian Baroque...
...Singers particularly fall into a trap...
...Issued on four 12" LPs (BG 565 to 568), the series gives a fascinating tour through the period that is usually considered to be the cradle of modern music...
...In other words, we go from the primitive to the simple to the complex to the esoteric, finally reaching a stage where the primitive becomes the frontier of the esoteric...
...Dufay and Ockeghem were among the leaders of early Flemish composition, and the Ockeghem record provides a bonus in the form of some motets by John Dunstable...
...Of course, being simple, it is deceptively difficult to perform...
...They are so used to the extreme dynamic contrasts and ruba-tos of 19th-century composition that they can't seem to let well enough alone...
...If you don't find a sense of newness in the older music, I'll be very much surprised...
...Until the Pro Musica Antiqua records this music, we shall have to rely on other LPs to hear the early Flemish masters at home...
...As a rule, the composers of this period intended that their music be performed without external alteration, knowing that the natural arch of the melody makes the dynamics adjust naturally and the note values do the same for the tempi...
...When this music was written, many of the instruments of the modern orchestra were still uninvented, and instrumentation was considered little more than an unobtrusive accompaniment for the vocal line...
...I know that most singers strive for a "rich" tone, but this type of music requires a "white" tone for fullest value...
...Particularly good are two recordings by a Belgian group called (not surprisingly) the Brussels Pro Musica Antiqua: sensitive performances of Guillaume Du-fay's Sacred Songs (DeccaARC-3003) and Jan Ockeghem's Chansons (Decca ARC-3052...
...The counter-tenor Russell Oberlin seems particularly steeped in the musical atmosphere of the period, although conductor Noah Greenberg has so blended the talents of the group that there is no star in the normal sense of the word...
...But the composers who wrote at this time were sophisticated men who made the most of their limited resources...
...The performances are excellent...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 48
