Let me first express my gratitude to Bo Holten and his team for giving us what it says in the title.

What Holten has attempted is not so much a reconstruction of what Lassus’ music might have sounded like when sung in Munich in 1575 but rather what he thinks ‘might be a way of making Lassus’ wonderful music accessible to a modern audience, making its natural and reticent telling of the story easy and appealing to follow’.

Be aware that despite Holten’s presentation, Lassus’ St Matthew Passion is very different from Bach’s masterpiece. It’s closer to the near-plainsong style of the early renaissance settings such as Richard Davy’s St Matthew Passion, contained in the Eton Choirbook. What Holten has done, however, is to set Lassus’ beautiful polyphonic choral music within the plainchant setting. Sample, if you can, track 16, the inserted Good Friday motet Animam meam dilectam tradidi (I have betrayed my beloved soul into the hands of the wicked). He even includes an excerpt from Lassus’ Italian madrigal collection Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of Saint Peter) at the appropriate point midway through the narrative.

That may well set you in search of the complete Lagrime, also very well performed by Bo Holten, with Ars Nova, on an earlier Naxos release (8.553311). Another very fine recording from Philippe Herreweghe and the Ensemble Vocal Européen is also recommendable (Harmonia Mundi d’Abord HMA1951483).

A third very fine recording, from Gallicantus and Gabriel Crouch comes at full price (Signum SIGCD339) but can be downloaded from Hyperion, with pdf booklet. Any one of these would do very nicely but the availability of the Signum in very good 24/96 sound from Hyperion, at a reasonable price – less than other download suppliers and less than the CD – may well clinch the matter. Lassus’ last known work, Lagrime makes a fitting supplement to the Matthew Passion.

I must also include a reminder another recording which features Lassus’ music for Passiontide. If you missed my strong recommendation of Stile Antico’s Passion and Resurrection (Harmonia Mundi HMU807555) in 2013 or John Quinn’s review of the same – Recording of the Month – now is the time to catch up. Lassus’ setting of the responsory In Monte Oliveti is only one of the treasures there.

It’s not clear why Lassus’ passion settings are so sparse, but this recording insets into the rather austere chant polyphonic jewels of great beauty, all rounded off with a performance of Agnus Dei. Austere settings of Passiontide music can be very moving, as in the case of Schütz’s St Matthew Passion, almost a century later (1666), but I found the pairing of austerity and beauty on the new Naxos Lassus recording extremely effective.

It’s less clear why Holten has decided to divide the music after the excerpt from Lagrime di San Pietro between the events of Maundy Thursday and those of Good Friday. There is no liturgical reason to do so: the St Matthew Passion would have been recited on Palm Sunday and the St John on Good Friday. There was no Passion reading at Mass on Maundy Thursday, the gospel for that day referring to the blessing of the oils.

That’s a minor niggle when the performances and recording are so good. Having listened in very decent mp3 via Naxos Music Library, I was pleased that the CD-quality press preview sounded even better. The full text and translation are included but that seems to have reduced the space for Bo Holten’s notes to just one side; I would have liked more.

The supposedly inviolable 80-minute limit for CDs was breached some time ago, but I don’t remember one so long as this. It’s certainly not a question of ‘never mind the quality; feel the width’, but it’s good to have this austere but beautiful setting, enlivened with polyphony, in very fine performances and all contained on a CD running to over 88 minutes. Complement it with the Lagrime di San Pietro.

– MusicWeb International (Brian Wilson)

Lassus: Masses for Five Voices / Infelix Ego

Orlande de Lassus, Europe's most famous musician during his lifetime, created nothing finer than the Lagrime di San Pietro, a collection of twenty spiritual madrigals and one motet for seven voices; A cycle of intense reflections on the sorrows of St Peter following his denial of Christ, it was assembled shortly before the composer's death in 1594 and dedicated to Pope Clement VIII. Into this collection Lassus pours every dramatic nuance and piece of harmonic invention he could possibly muster, hurling the listener through the stages of Peter's rage, remorse and resignation, and concluding with a motet which presents Christ's response to the world. Gallicantus (Latin for 'song of the rooster') add to their already impressive catalogue of works on Signum with this new recording. Their previous release The Word Unspoken: Sacred Music by William Byrd and Philippe de Monte was picked as one of the best discs 2012 by BBC Radio 3 CD Review.

Lassus: Lagrime Di San Pietro

The wedding in 1568 of Renate of Lorraine to Wilhelm V, heir to the throne of the Duke of Bavaria, was a sumptuous, 18-day spectacular designed to rival those of the Italian courts. Orlande de Lassus had been the court’s maestro di cappella since 1556. Using an eye-witness account of the event, Ensemble Origo presents a hypothetical reconstruction of some of his musical contributions – a Te Deum, the moresca (a genre related to the villanella), and an improvised comedy – thereby shedding light on some of the various meanings that the music had for its 16th-century listeners. Ensemble Origo is an early music ensemble founded in 2010 and directed by Connecticut-based musicologist and conductor Eric Rice. Its aim is to present vibrant performances and recordings of early music – from the Middle Ages through to the Baroque – that reflect the context in which the repertory was originally produced and heard; ‘Origo’ is Latin for ‘earliest beginning’, ‘lineage’, or ‘origin’. The ensemble draws on a roster of musicians from Connecticut, Boston, and New York.

From Eric Rice, Director of Ensemble Origo: "This recording originated from my curiosity about the moresca, an Italian musical genre that caricatured Black Africans. I wanted to know where, how, and for whom these pieces were performed; this recording of four vignettes from a 16th-century wedding is the result."

"Like most scholars and performers of early European music, I am a white person of privilege, and among the many things such privilege has afforded me is the opportunity to study and perform this music. While I do not claim any first-hand knowledge of exclusion due to my race, my gender, or the traditional beliefs of my ancestors, I am fervently interested in understanding racism, oppression, and their manifestations in cultures past and present. Oppression in music of the past is often simple erasure on the part of music historians and performers: the tacit denial that people of other races even existed in a particular time and place, either through neglect or refusal to bring their documented presence to light. Such erasure, in turn, has resulted in a lack of understanding of how music was used to perpetuate the myth of white European superiority."

"In this recording, I aim to show the presence of Black Africans in several 16th-century European musical works, to demonstrate how these works were used, and to invite our listeners to consider their various purposes, including the perpetuation of the white superiority myth. While I could have demonstrated such uses solely in the context of scholarly articles, these have less currency and immediacy than the act of listening – of bearing witness with the ears – to this music, which must first be performed by modern musicians. Indeed, many of these representations have to be heard in order to gain a robust understanding of how they function. This performance of Lassus’s moresche in something like their original context does not constitute an endorsement of the views expressed in them, nor does it represent unambiguous advocacy for them as works of art. Though these pieces have been recorded before, little regard has been paid to the original context in which they were created and performed. This recording seeks to address that."

Le Nozze In Baviera: Sung Text

REVIEW:

In the early spring of 1568 the wedding took place in Bavaria of Renate of Lorraine to Wilhelm V, heir to that Southern German dukedom. Lassus had by then travelled extensively (there are claims that he also visited England and France) from his native Mons at least to Germany and Italy. He was Duke Albrecht V’s (Wilhelm’s father) maestro di cappella and so provided the music for a celebration which Albrecht was determined to make an occasion to be remembered. The following year Massimo Troiano wrote a description of the event(s) in a form sufficiently detailed and vivid to allow Rice to attempt a hypothetical reconstruction of how the music may have sounded.

There its humour (Lucia, celu [tr.6], for instance), piety (the Te Deum [tr.1]), uninhibited celebration (Cathalina, apra finestra [tr.8]), parody and Burlesque (Álla la pia calia [tr.3]), bawdy (O Lucia, miau [tr.7]), ceremony (Chi chilichi [tr.9]), and pathos (Chi passa per 'sta strada [tr.12]). This last is actually by a contemporary of Lassus, Filippo Azzaiolo, who was born between 1530 and 1540 and lived until after 1570 and gets just that one track on the CD.

In fact there is all the fun, frolicking and abandon of a wedding—especially one lasting as long as this one did… at least a fortnight. So the guests (here the performers of Ensemble Origo) realise that they had better behave themselves and hold their drink, and temper their abandon with lucidity and a measure of decorum which mustn’t sound too reluctant. The performers here get this just right.

For many new to Lassus, Le nozze in Baviera will give a slice of his non-sacred works that ought to delight and invite further exploration. For those who value this—yes—still much underrated composer, the CD may show something new. In all cases, it is one to revel in.

– MusicWeb International

At the height of the Renaissance, the music of Orlande de Lassus frequently combines the emotion of secular music with sacred compositions. With their erotic connotations, the texts of The Song of Songs are an ideal source for bringing together sacred and profane feelings. Based on his most famous song, Lassus wrote one of his unitary masses: Suzanne un jour. Along with the Magnificat that he composed on De Rore's madrigal Ancor che col partire, here are two religious compositions of which the themes are borrowed from evocations of amorous turmoil.