The Franco-Flemish Masters

Though not widely remembered today outside of specialist circles, Jacob Obrecht was one of the most famous and important composers of sacred music in 15th-century Europe, and the recent resurgence in interest in his music (thanks to the early music movement) has brought some exquisite music back to light. This recording by the Oxford Camerata brings Obrecht’s Missa Caput together with two Salve Regina settings and the motet “Venit ad Petrum,” all sung in a beautifully restrained, straightforward style.

If you can’t get enough of the sacred music of Johannes Ockeghem, then this five-disc box is exactly what you need. It contains no fewer than thirteen of the Franco-Flemish master’s Mass settings, several of them “parody” Masses written on the basis of such popular songs of the era as “L’homme armé” and “Fors seulement.” The Clerks Group, led by Edward Wickham, is an outstanding ensemble known for the practice of singing from facsimile editions of original Renaissance manuscripts.

As the popularity of Renaissance choral music has grown in recent decades, one of the most common ways of presenting a composer’s works has been to create programs that put sacred songs alongside secular ones. On this recording, the excellent Capella Alamire ensemble presents both sacred motets and love songs by Nicolas Gombert, a composer of the Franco-Flemish School who flourished in what is now northern France in the early 16th century.

During the Renaissance period, it was very common for composers to write Mass settings that used popular songs as melodic sources; the cactus firmus would be the popular melody, and a whole large-scale choral composition would elaborate upon it. For this Mass, the Franco-Flemish composer Jean Richafort used the melody of a song called “Dictes moy toutes voz pensées” (archaic French for “tell me all your thoughts”) to create a lush and somber masterpiece of religious music, sung beautifully here by the Tallis Scholars.

Chanticleer, America’s premier all-male choral ensemble, has created an absolutely exquisite album with this recording of a parody Mass by the Franco-Flemish composer Antoine Brumel. For his melodic source material, Brumel chose a secular song by Josquin Desprez: “Berzerette savoyenne.” From that tune he builds a complex edifice of devotional music that is performed with luminous tone and hushed wonder by Chanticleer, resulting in one of their most gorgeous releases.

Between the early 15th and the early 17th centuries, something happened in the Franco-Flemish region of Europe (basically, the area between what are today northern France and northern Belgium). Over those 200 years, five generations of composers arose who created a new and distinct style of choral music, which has come to be called the Franco-Flemish School. Pierre de la Rue was a member of the third generation of these composers, and today his life and early career remain shrouded in mystery – it’s not at all clear where he was born or educated. We know that he was developing as a composer in the last decade or two of the 1400s and came to musical maturity around the turn of the 16th century, when two of the Masses on this recording (Missa Almana and Missa Puer natus est) were first published, though it seems likely that Missa Almana was written prior to his appointment to the Burgundian Habsburg court sometime between 1489 and 1492. The other two compositions presented here, Missa de Sancto Antonio and Missa Tous les regretz, are both later works; the latter is one of his most popular and frequently performed, and is a parody Mass based on a popular melody later also used by his younger contemporary Nicolas Gombert.

What about these performances? Beauty Farm is a small, all-male vocal ensemble that focuses its work almost exclusively on the Franco-Flemish masters, and includes members of such illustrious larger ensembles as Graindelavoix, Collegium Vokale Ghent, and the Huelgas Ensemble. Even those who generally prefer the sound of larger or mixed-voice choral groups are strongly urged to give Beauty Farm’s recordings a try; this one exemplifies the ensemble’s unusual ability to conjure a rich, colorful sound from its small forces, and the dark timbre of the voices is a particularly good match for the somber and introspective mood of De la Rue’s music – a flavor that may be owed to the famously melancholy mood of his patroness’s court. This is utterly gorgeous music, and both the performances and the recording quality are quietly ravishing.

The rather oddly-named Dionysos Now! ensemble has embarked on a multi-album project dedicated to the music of Adrian Willaert, one of the less famous composers of the Franco-Flemish School that flourished in northern France and Belgium in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. On the first installment, they perform Willaert’s Missa Mittit ad Virginem, along with the motet on which it’s based and several other sacred motets by the same composer. The ensemble’s sound is beautiful and they are recorded in a richly reverberant acoustic.

The Boston-based Blue Heron choir is one of America’s leading interpreters of Renaissance choral music, and this collection of works by the Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay — the ensemble’s debut recording — is a great introduction to their sound. It focuses on sacred and liturgical music, but also includes a handful of secular songs and a few pieces from Dufay’s contemporaries John Dunstable, Hugo de Lantins, and Johannes Ockeghem.

Perhaps the foremost current exponents of what has come to be called the Oxbridge Sound are the Tallis Scholars, founded in 1973 and still led by Peter Phillips. On this recording, the group presents Mass settings by three composers of the Franco-Flemish School, all of them active in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, but only one of them (Josquin Desprez) still widely known today. Noel Bauldeweyn is almost forgotten, but his Missa Da pacem is exquisite, as is Antoine Brumel’s Missa Mater patris. Josquin’s Mass on the same song rounds out an outstanding program.

Jean Richafort may not be the most famous of the Franco-Flemish School composers who flourished in 15th and 16th century France and Belgium, nor was he terribly prolific. But his surviving music is some of the most sumptuously lovely of that period, and on this recording the funeral Mass he wrote in tribute to his teacher, the much more famous Josquin Desprez, is rendered beautifully by the Helgas-Ensemble under the direction of Paul van Nevel.