Tag: Jean Mouton

Josquin’s Legacy, The Gesualdo Six, Wigmore Hall, 10 October 2022

The Gesualdo Six photo by Sprague-Coolidge, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Gesualdo Six is a wonderful Renaissance choir. However, I had a numerical problem with its promotional material when I first saw them in 2018…

Fading: The Hour Is At Hand, The Gesualdo Six, St John’s Smith Square, 28 March 2018

…which seems to be unresolved despite my pleas. The publicity material for The Gesualdo Six regularly shows seven people.

I’m not really one to talk, having recently been part of a six-person works-outing winning quiz combo known as “The FS Club 7”. But readers, many of whom are early music lovers, will surely know that the name is not a numerical claim, but a pun on the early music (i.e. some of it released even before the turn of the 21st century) pop combo, S Club 7.

But it is not my purpose in this piece to “bring it all back” in the matter of S Club 7’s ancient exploits, but rather to assess the wonderful world of Josquin’s Legacy, as sung by The Gesualdo Six.

While Josquin’s mostly late 15th century music formed the core of the concert, there were also pieces by his contemporaries, Jean Mouton & Antoine Brumel, plus several works by lesser known composers who followed a generation or so later.

It was a mixture of sacred music (both new and old testament liturgy) plus several regret/deploration pieces commemorating the death of fellow composers or patrons.

Here is a link to The Gesualdo’s promo vid for the album which this concert was surely (in part) aiming to help promulgate.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall concert programme.

The concert was a BBC Lunchtime concert, which, if you are reading this within a month of the broadcast, can still be heard on the BBC Sounds App – here.

The Wigmore Hall also streamed this one, so you can watch and listen here.

This was Janie’s first opportunity to see/hear The Gesualdo Six live and she was much taken with the group.

“The Gesualdo Six: great with singing, not so special when it comes to numbers.”

Not too bad a tag line.

The Tallis Scholars: Isaac and Mouton, Wigmore Hall, 9 March 2017

Been going a very long time

Heinrich Isaac died 500 years ago this month. Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have been around for most of that time…

…OK, not really, but they have been around since the mid 1970s, which is one heck of a long time. What a superb and professional troupe they are.

The concert was billed as being Isaac and Mouton, but in truth it was almost all about Isaac.

Here is a link to the Wigmore Hall resource for the concert we saw/heard. The centrepiece of the first half of the concert was Isaac’s wonderful Missa de apostolis. The second half had more, shorter works; motets, including one by Mouton but the rest all by Isaac.

We spotted Michael Heseltine in the audience a few rows behind us, when we returned from the interval. A bit of a coincidence, as Janie was seeing Angela the next day; Angela was Hesser’s right hand person, back in the day.

We’ve seen The Tallis Scholars before and I have a few of their recordings of Renaissance and Early Baroque music: Brumel, Gombert and Taverner, all excellent. Indeed we listened to this Taverner one – click here – when we got home. 

But before getting home we were treated to a delightful encore of Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen, a choral work attributed to (and probably the best known work of) Isaac. It was one of the greatest hits of the Renaissance. In truth, Isaac almost certainly didn’t write the words and possibly didn’t even write the music. But Isaac did live in Innsbruck at one time and did leave the place, perhaps in sorrow as suggested by the song, c1485. That was around the same time as, in Blighty,  Dick The Shit was feeding worms underneath a forthcoming Leicestershire car park and the Tudor era was just kicking off.

We’re talking nearly 100 years ahead of Greensleeves publication, so Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen might well have been at Number One in the Renaissance charts for some 5000 weeks.

In these circumstances, it seemed only sensible for me to get my head around the words, chords and music – click here.

I’ve been working on that lovely song periodically since. It’ll go down an absolute storm on my baroq-ulele. I’m nowhere near as adept as The Tallis Scholars, needless to say, but they are nowhere near as Baroque-and-roll as me.  You never know, my version might just be the summer hit sensation of 2017.

Here are the King’s Singers giving it a go: