Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
You don't look to a John Potter recording for
conventionality, and we certainly don't get it here. I admire Potter's originality of approach and
I like many of his previous recordings, but I'm afraid this just doesn’t work
for me.
Potter has taken some fine works of polyphony, chiefly by
two of its truly great composers, Josquin and Victoria, and has recorded them
as solo-voice or duet pieces accompanied by differnt vihuelas and in some cases
featuring a viola da gamba. The
performances themselves are excellent; Potter is a wonderful countertenor, Anna
Maria Friman matches him perfectly in the duets and the instrumentalists are
all superb – including the wonderful Hille Perl. It's excellent musicianship, but…
I simply don't think that the music is suitable for this
treatment. A great part (perhaps the
whole part) of polyphony is the interplay of human voices of largely equal
importance. Without this it loses almost
all its beauty and emotional impact for me.
For example, the disc opens with Jean Mouton's sublime motet Nesciens
Mater, whose real appeal is the exquisite, shifting harmonies and polyphonic
lines which, when sung by a good choir, create a stunning sense of peace,
beauty and spirituality. One sung line
and a vihuela accompaniment, however well done, doesn't come close to this and
I'm afraid I felt the same about the whole of the disc. It's an interesting experiment, I suppose,
but to me it just misses most of the point of the music and I find it a bit
dull.
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