Gregorio Allegri : Miserere, messe, motets

Album review

This 1994 disc is something of a classic of the new strain of the historical-performance movement, which is characterized by a certain amount of license to speculate in the reconstruction of lost works. The Miserere mei Deus of Gregorio Allegri is, of course, not a lost work, but one with an unbroken performance tradition stretching back to its composition in the early seventeenth century (before 1638). It was sung for centuries at the Sistine Chapel, where the singers were enjoined from circulating the music beyond Vatican walls. That prohibition wasn't enough to stop the 12-year-old Mozart, who wrote most of it down by ear as a tourist in Rome and filled in the gaps on a quick return visit; soon after that, British music writer Charles Burney got hold of either Mozart's copy (which hasn't survived) or another one and published the work. But by that time the Miserere had itself changed from what Allegri might have imagined. The work, which stood in a tradition of similar, earlier pieces, had an improvisational component, drawing on a centuries-old process of elaboration and harmony singing known as falsobordone (fauxbourdon in French, faburden in English). The Vatican singers, as the booklet explains and illustrates with contemporary quotations, gradually lost the skill to execute these improvisations, and the work took on the vivid but fixed contrasts between two choirs that are known today. French conductor Bernard Fabre-Garrus and his small choir A Sei Voci try, in the first track on the album, to reconstruct the work as Allegri might have heard it. The singers add a mostly upper line of counterpoint and elaborate it floridly, creating music that's completely different in effect, more spectacular and extroverted, than the Miserere. Fabre-Garrus exaggerates the contrast by calling for a sharp, coruscating sound from the singers and the initial Miserere, but then reining them in for the later version, performed at the end of the disc. The pairing offers a crash course in how much our understanding of seventeenth century music has been shaped by performance traditions. In between comes other music by Allegri, almost completely unknown but highly listenable and relevant in various ways to the mystery of the Miserere. The Missa vidi turbam magnam is a good example of what happened when composers tried to adapt the intrinsically conservative form of the mass to the new musical language of the seventeenth century; it is outwardly a work in the polyphonic stile antico of the Renaissance, but it is full of sunny major harmonies and direct harmonic moves that show the influence of modern styles. The three motets that follow (tracks 9-11) are in the new, continuo-accompanied manner; they are for three or four solo voices, in lush, close harmonies, and are accompanied here by a small organ. Altogether this was a disc that did much to illuminate a work whose connection to the extreme tendencies of the seventeenth century had mostly been forgotten, and it has inspired tribute in the form of various further attempts to refine performance of the Miserere mei Deus.

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