Les fantaisies de Josquin (Josquin Desprez)

Albumbeschreibung

The instrumental music of Josquin Desprez is, as Ensemble Leones director Marc Lewon points out, a neglected part of this titanic composer's output. The neglect is due to various factors, most prominently that true instrumental music during Josquin's life was in its infancy, and even that potentially attributable to Josquin survives mostly in publications of dubious provenance that may have tried to traffic in his famous name. Moreover, there has been little evidence as to what the music was actually supposed to sound like; many pieces were simply designated as à 3 or à 4. This selection by the multinational Ensemble Leones has specialist tendencies; Lewon is proposing an instrumental sound and a framework in which the music makes sense. But the album also holds some appeal for those who simply appreciate Josquin music, even if it isn't going to carve out a place for these pieces in the canon of essential Josquin. Lewon's settings lie somewhere between what would become the broken consort (of varied instruments) and the whole consort (of similar ones): he uses a group of three or four viols, augmented by plucked strings (harp and/or lute) and sometimes by a cornett, a delightful effect. The latter isn't supported by any particular piece of evidence, but the instrument was known to have been used in Flanders (where Josquin's instrumental music would likely have originated), and it certainly makes musical sense. The pieces themselves are of several kinds. The album title Les Fantaisies de Josquin refers to a couple of odd works that seem to have been independent of vocal models, but most of the pieces would be more accurately described as polyphonic elaborations of vocal models, many of them monophonic songs including the famous L'homme armé. These are often introduced by the vocal model itself, followed by two or three different instrumental treatments by (probably) Josquin. These are fairly intricate contrapuntally rather than being cousins to the peppy songs that resulted from Josquin's foray into light Italian secular music. Although the models are in various languages, the pieces most resemble instrumental counterparts to Josquin's French chansons. As such, the ease with which Josquin constructs entirely distinctive pieces from the same basic material bears the hallmark of his genius. The addition of a newly commissioned work by Arvo Pärt at the end, understandable in terms of a certain similarity in Pärt's elaboration of simple basic material, distracts from the overall effect, and the playing, while competent, is subdued. Overall, however, this is an album that true Josquin lovers, and especially libraries with Josquin collections, will want to own.
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