The shadow cast by Josquin des Pres over the early Renaissance period is so all encompassing that it's easy to miss the fantastic, and musically very different, achievements of his contemporaries. One of them is Dutch composer Pierre de la Rue, whose remarkable music is a blend of both established techniques drawing from medieval practice in elaborating chant and then-new techniques of part-writing and imitation devices. Naxos' Pierre de la Rue: The Complete Magnificats; Three Salve Reginas featuring a cappella vocal group VivaVoce under the direction of
Peter Schubert, is a major contribution to de la Rue's recorded canon, covering a major subset of his work -- his eight settings of the Magnificat -- in its entirety, along with three of his Salve Reginas. Hitherto the parts of de la Rue's output that have received the most attention are his settings of the mass -- of which there are more than 30 -- and his secular chansons.
Recorded at the L'Eglise de la Visitation, which is the oldest standing church in Montréal, the sound -- so important in Renaissance vocal music -- is very good, a little distant but not too far away, with just enough natural reverberation to provide a sense of space and take the edge off the voices. In a musicological sense, this is very integral and no nonsense; the recording is rich with chant incipits and it appears that every possible incipit is taken, and there is no attempt at "period ornamentation" of which we know next to nothing in this era, or of other speculative devices. That said, it is also true that all of the readings are very close to one another in terms of tempi and dynamics; very few, if any, details stand out, and
Schubert's interpretation seems to attempt for a kind of unanimity of sound throughout without regard for the text and what it means. While VivaVoce achieves a lovely general sound, these performances never quite seem to take wing as in Naxos' transcendent recording of Jacob Obrecht's Missa Caput by
Jeremy Summerly and the
Oxford Camerata, or, to keep the comparisons relevant to the composer, Schola Discantus' recording of de la Rue's Missa de Sancta Anna. In sum, while Naxos' Pierre de la Rue: The Complete Magnificats; Three Salve Reginas might not take you to heaven, it is certainly a faithful and honest offering in the spirit of de la Rue and does considerable justice to a significant part of his oeuvre.