This is a reissue of a performance from 1985 -- a time when most choirs that performed Renaissance masses started with the Kyrie and ran straight through until they finished up with Agnus Dei III and its prayer for peace. This wasn't how the music for the mass was (or is) used, but the performance mode fit the way this music, distant from us in time and place, was initially taught and understood -- it sought to elucidate the music's basic structure and characteristics. And in this it succeeds. On the program are two of the ...
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This is a reissue of a performance from 1985 -- a time when most choirs that performed Renaissance masses started with the Kyrie and ran straight through until they finished up with Agnus Dei III and its prayer for peace. This wasn't how the music for the mass was (or is) used, but the performance mode fit the way this music, distant from us in time and place, was initially taught and understood -- it sought to elucidate the music's basic structure and characteristics. And in this it succeeds. On the program are two of the more extreme masses of the High Renaissance: the murky Requiem of Pierre de la Rue and the intellectually acrobatic Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae of Josquin, along with the famous Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem. The performers second-guess the notation of la Rue's requiem mass and transpose it upwards -- a practice that still has its defenders, but that a greater understanding of the role tessitura plays in Renaissance music has made problematical. In any event, the mass...
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