Some three years have passed since the appearance of the Binchois Consort’s last release on Hyperion: a pre-Covid recording of ‘Music for the King of Scots’. That disc featured a novel approach to recreating the environment of the chapel where the music was originally performed, recording the pieces in a ‘dead’ studio and then ‘adding in’ the acoustic at the post-recording stage. It’s a procedure that’s also used to vivid effect in the group’s latest recording, whose main work is a remarkable reconstruction of Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella (based on the popular mock-warlike song ‘Scaramella’ best known from Josquin Desprez’s eponymous four-voice chanson).
The justification for this approach is very simple: much polyphonic music of the late medieval and Renaissance periods was typically performed not in the vast resonant spaces we’re used to from recordings, but rather in small side chapels with low ceilings, hung with tapestries and often strewn with reeds or grass. This and the bodies of the clergy, musicians and congregation would have had a dampening effect on the acoustic, and the difference is striking. It takes but a while for the ear to adjust from typical expectations, and the result is an unquestionably greater musical immediacy. Coupled with the Binchois Consort’s trademark rhythmic buoyancy and the ebullience of having two countertenors on the top voice of the texture, the effect is strikingly obvious in the disc’s opening item, Antoine Brumel’s motet Philippe, qui videt me, reconstructed by the ensemble’s long-term musicological collaborator, the late Philip Weller, to whose memory the album is dedicated.
Weller had only just begun work on the Scaramella Mass when his untimely death intervened; the bulk of the reconstruction was thus undertaken by his colleague and friend Fabrice Fitch (familiar to readers of Gramophone as one of its most perceptive early music reviewers). Like Weller, Fitch has worked closely with the Binchois Consort and its director Andrew Kirkman throughout the project, and the result is an astonishing piece of detective work which reveals this Mass setting, though not as expansive as Obrecht’s late Missa Maria zart, as one of the composer’s finest cycles. The treatment of the ‘Scaramella’ cantus firmus is tremendously varied, sometimes heard in the top voice (as in the central ‘Et incarnatus est’ section of the Credo and the second Agnus Dei), at others buried within the texture, heard in retrograde (i.e. backwards) or inversion (upside-down). The broad arcs of Obrecht’s unique musical style are balanced by the compactness of the two Kyries, and the strikingly varied five-section Sanctus—Benedictus.
Kirkman and his singers guide the listener through this absorbing musical landscape with a sureness of pulse, immaculate intonation and brightness of timbre that are endlessly compelling, bringing out all the beauty of Obrecht’s contrapuntal mastery while revelling in the sheer exuberance of the textures. One notable example: the F sharp—F natural clash towards the end of the ‘Pleni sunt caeli’, held boldly for just long enough to have maximum impact on the listener.
The Mass is followed by Obrecht’s five-voice motet Mater Patris, its missing second contratenor part reconstructed by Philip Weller. This four-section Marian meditation is more reflective than some of the composer’s other five-voice works, and it is given a wonderfully rapt and seamless yet focused performance here. The overlapping sequence of duets that open the ‘Ab aeterno generatus’ section (‘From eternity is made transcience’) is particularly touching.
These two major works by Obrecht are bookended by settings of the 'Scaramella' song by Josquin (a shade less unbuttoned than some performances on disc, but striking just the right tone for the present context) and Loyset Compère. Before the Compère, however, is Fabrice Fitch’s own Planctus David, setting text from a motet by Pierre de La Rue. Composed in Philip Weller’s memory and movingly performed by the Binchois Consort at his memorial concert in 2019, its pained dissonances and astonishing inwardness evoke the intensity of King David’s lament for the fallen Jonathan.
The disc closes with a final tribute to Weller, Alexander Agricola’s five-voice motet Sanctus Philippe apostole, whose vibrant music with its surprising turns makes a gloriously affirmative close to this very special album. To those who knew him—his many friends, colleagues and students—Philip Weller was the embodiment of a Renaissance man in the very fullest sense: a musical polymath, performer, scholar, thinker, polyglot, imaginative, thoughtful and unfailingly generous. This disc is a very fitting tribute, which fairly bubbles over with the enthusiasm he had for music and for his fellow creatures. And as a continuation of the Binchois Consort’s continuing probing exploration of music from the 15th century, it’s simply unmissable.