Music from the Court of Charles V. - Huelgas Ensemble - sound recording reviews

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Ralph Robert Toledano

IN A SETTING of the Psalmen Davids, 26 psalms in German translation, Heinrich Schutz advises musicians "not to hurry the beat" and to "adhere to a moderate tempo." Otherwise, he warned, "there will ensue a most unpleasant harmony, all too like a battaglia di mosche"--a battle of flies. The bit of humor was typical, as was the advice. For Schutz was not merely the first great German composer, writing more powerfully and vibrantly than anyone before or after him until Bach dominated German music a century later. He was a bridge between Renaissance polyphony and his own development of the Italian baroque style. The Psalmen Davids, the finest of his extant works, lives up to the surprisingly moving remark by Virgil Thomson, that Schutz's setting of verbal texts was "heartbreakingly meaningful." This is eminently true in the lucent and faithful reading by the Kammerchor Stuttgart and the Musica Fiata Koln, directed by Frieder Bernius (Sony Classical S2K 48042).

Nicolas Gombert (c. 1495-c. 1560) is hardly mentioned in the "encyclopedias" of music. Yet he has been considered one of the greatest composers of church music, whose magnificently euphonious and fervently religious compositions were the culmination of Franco-Flemish polyphony. In this, and in his innovations, he went beyond his teacher, the still-famous Josquin des Pres. Music from the Court of Charles V is a beautiful sampling of his work, both religious and secular, in Latin and French. A Magnificat and a Missa Tempore Paschali are marked by that quiet transcendental spirit characteristic of the voice of Toledo. Gombert went beyond Josquin by disentangling the textual from the polyphonic lines, giving his utterance a simpler beauty--and this is underscored in the voices and instruments of the Huelgas Ensemble, whose performance is richly commensurate with the music (Sony Classical SK 48249).