MUSIC FROM THE TIME OF TILMAN RIEMENSCHNEIDER

VARIOUS BAND

Released on 1/2/05 by Naxos
Main artist: Il Curioso
Genre: Classical

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Music from the Time of Tilman Riemenschneider offers a pleasant hour of mostly instrumental (and mostly recorder-based) short pieces of the Renaissance for those who desire such a thing. The two German groups involved, Il Curioso and the Hedos-Ensemble, play engagingly, and recorder player Bernhard Böhm gets in some very fancy fingerwork on a few more soloistic pieces. There are nice contrasts between pieces played by a group of recorders and those featuring the louder outdoor instruments of the period, such as the crumhorn and shawm.
Purchasers get an additional bonus: the music included here has not been recorded terribly often. Some of it comes from a pair of the earliest music publications, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton printed by Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice in 1501 and the 18 basses danse garnies de recoupes, one of the collections issued by Pierre Attaingnant in 1530. Other pieces are drawn from slightly earlier hand-compiled German collections: the Glogauer Liederbuch (ca. 1480), the Lochamer Liederbuch (1452-1460), and a few others. The names of all these collections have been dutifully memorized by generations of music students taking Renaissance survey courses, but the music itself doesn't get heard very often. This will be a good disc for instructors and libraries to have in their collections.
All this said, those interested specifically in this repertory may not find Music from the Time of Tilman Riemenschneider very informative. The lifespan of Riemenschneider, a south German sculptor born around 1460, serves merely as a temporal limiter for the music. Drawing connections between Renaissance music and art is a tricky business. A magnificent recent series from France's Alpha label hits the ball out of the park. Other releases swing nobly and whiff. But here, annotator Hugh Griffith doesn't even step up to the plate. He describes Riemenschneider's life, including interesting details about how he fell into the hands of torturers during the conflicts between civil and ecclesiastical powers that raged during these times. But then he turns his back on the art and dryly takes up the music. He makes the point that many of the pieces here represented the creep of sophisticated northern polyphonic techniques into a local semi-popular repertory, but that idea isn't very well illustrated by the music actually included; there's only one series of pieces based on the same song, a group of three versions of a hilariously rude tune called Greiner, Zenner, wie gefelt dir das?
For the average listener, though, the album makes a decent entry point into music that has been more often mentioned than played. The sound of the recording, made in a monastery in Würzburg, is close to ideal.

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MUSIC FROM THE TIME OF TILMAN RIEMENSCHNEIDER

Il Curioso

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