
To hear music especially
written for the Sistine Chapel, much of it by former members of the Sistine
Chapel choir, sung by the present-day Sistine Chapel Choir and recorded in the
Sistine Chapel is reason enough to celebrate the release of this disc. That every work on the disc is a true gem, a
miniature masterpiece (to quote the booklet notes, “the finest polyphonic works
of the Renaissance and Baroque periods”), and that some of it has not been
heard before outside the Sistine Chapel is an even more compelling reason to
seek this disc out. And, if further inducement
was needed, they have brought in no less a figure than Cecilia Bartoli to be
the first female voice ever to be recorded alongside this all-male choir.
Monseigneur Massimo Palombella,
the choir’s director, has been given free rein of the Vatican’s huge musical
library, and has clearly relished the opportunity to delve into musicological
research not only in finding the music and preparing it for performance, but in
philosophising over the ways in which it might have originally been
performed. This has led to some
decisions about performance which he puts into practice in this disc, one of
which is to place smaller sections of the choir in the gallery to contrast with
the main body of the choir recorded standing before the altar. This, however, is not always evident in a
recording which keeps the voices, wherever they are in the chapel, at roughly
the same distance from the microphones. On top of that, carpets were laid down
for the recording sessions in a bid to dampen the chapel’s voluminous acoustic,
and while the resultant sound is warm and immensely comforting, surrounded by a
pleasing halo of acoustic space, it also has a muffled quality with detail in
the lower voices often obscure.
The programme itself
draws on music which is associated with historic Papal celebrations of that
period of the church’s year which extends from Advent through Christmas and Epiphany
to Candlemas, and ranges from the 12th century (Peronitus) to the 17th
(Allegri). There are three works billed
as “World Premiere Recordings” by Dufay, Allegri and Marenzio, as well as
several well-known motets, including an atmospheric performance of Victoria’s O magnum mysterium. Those who know
Giovanni Allegri only through his famous Lenten setting of the Miserere mei will immediately spot some
stylistic differences, but this performance of his Nasceris, alme puer suffers badly from an irritating habit
Palombella has of excessive phrase bulging - introducing sudden, short but
heavy swelling dynamics - and of pulling up the ends of phrases abruptly
(presumably to let the acoustic finish the job off). Perhaps that tendency is at its most annoying
in Palestrina’s Canite tuba in Sion where
the continual dynamic surges induce a sensation akin to mal de mer.
Nevertheless Palombella
has built a fine choir here which is easily in its element both with the music
and the environment (the booklet includes a stunning picture of the choir in
rehearsal all but overwhelmed by Michelangelo’s great altar wall fresco of The Last Judgement, and, as if to remind
us how church music has changed since the time when these works were written,
another photo of them gathered round an electric keyboard). The performances are well prepared and effectively
and confidently delivered. Quicker
passagework is not always secure - there’s a moment of unfortunate scruffiness
in the livelier passagework of Nonino’s motet Hodie nobis caelorum Rex – and in places tuning of the lower parts
wobbles. But overall this is a disc
which exudes calm and beauty and where technicalities pale into insignificance
beside the supreme loveliness of the music and the recorded sound. My real concern is that it is in danger of
becoming swamped by its own beauty. Try
as I might, I find it difficult to identify clear differences between the works
being performed; after a while they all merge into a kind of smooth,
conglomerate, velvety aural wallpaper which, for all its supreme loveliness,
loses its impact simply because the superficial effect is so appealing.
Bartoli’s contribution
is to Peronitus’s Beata viscera Mariae
Virginis. It may last less than four
minutes of music, but it is four minutes of absolute sublimity. Bartoli beautifully encapsulates the essence
of a text which conveys the joy, wonder and mystery of the Virgin birth.
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