Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Agnus Dei
6. Kyrie
7. Gloria
8. Credo
9. Sanctus
10. Agnus Dei

Disc 2:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Agnus Dei
6. Introitus

Disc 3:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Agnus dei

Disc 4:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Agnus Dei

Disc 5:

1. Introitus
2. Kyrie
3. Graduale
4. Sequentia
5. Offertorium
6. Sanctus
7. Benedictus
8. Agnus Dei
9. Communio

Disc 6:

1. Carmina chromatico
2. Sibylla Persica
3. Sibylla Libyca
4. De profundis clamavi
5. Agnus Dei
6. Lamentatio prima, secundi dei
7. Com falda di neve
8. Introitus

Disc 7:

1. Unspecified Salve Regina
2. Kyrie
3. Gloria
4. Credo
5. Sanctus
6. Agnus Dei
7. Tenebrae factae sunt
8. O vos omnes
9. Astiterunt reges
10. Aestimatus sum
11. Unspecified Requiem Introitus

Disc 8:

1. Nunc dimitis
2. Kyrie (a 5)
3. Gloria (a 3)
4. Credo (a 4)
5. Sanctus (a 3)
6. Agnus Dei (a 5)

Disc 9:

1. Kyrie
2. Gloria
3. Credo
4. Sanctus
5. Agnus Dei
6. (Liber tertius) Seria VI Parasceve
7. (Liber tertius) Seria VI Parasceve
8. (Liber tertius) Seria VI Parasceve

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #372542 in Music
• Released on: 2002-02-26
• Number of discs: 12
• Formats: Box set, Enhanced

Customer Reviews

One of the Great Vocal Collections in my Library
Those of us who were reared on The Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen seldom venture out to discover other, comparably well-produced albums of polyphonic choral music by lesser known choral groups. Well, now we have a reason to look farther afield.

Cypres, a fine Belgian label, has just released a 12-CD album by the Laudantes Consort providing the most wide-ranging survey of polyphony available at super budget price. On eleven disks, we hear beautifully engineered recordings of the keynote works of de Morales, Tallis, Victoria, Byrd, Palestrina, de Lassus and others offered one artist per disk. As for information resources, the collection offers a 12th disk, a Mac/PC-compatible CD-ROM, containing the full text of each piece, essays on the historical settings in which the works and their composers emerged -- and more. The packaging is practical and tasteful. Disks are presented in spacious sleeves which are unlikely to scratch disks even after years of use. Finally, for those of you who are fussy about the physical quality of your disks -- Sony/Austria has done a bang-up job in producing disks which appear to be technically free of flaws. The box itself is gorgeous. It is fashionably slim-pack in design and beautifully illustrated. I urge you, then, to take a very close look at this gargantuan collection of rapturous music performed by one of the best European consorts under the direction of Guy Janssens. With Good Friday and Easter upon us, I cannot imagine a more moving tribute to the glories of traditional church music than what we have here....My only caveat is that some works which might have been presented in their entirety -- such as Byrd's "Great Service" -- are excerpted. But this is a minor annoyance in an otherwise inspiring set.

An anthology of great breadth
Before the Austro-German tradition in music, before the Italian musical dynasty - before them all there was the Franco-Flemish school of music. I Fiamminghi, was the name given to the Flemish composers whose international reputations spread right throughout Europe of the Renaissance. Even the contrapunctal imitative style of J.S. Bach could only ever have come into existence thanks to the practices established by I Fiamminghi. So it is good to see the Belgians rediscover their musical heritage that had so resounding an impact on the course of musical history.

Guy Janssens was born in Brussels and studied music at the Louvain conservatory. In 1981 he founded the group that later bore the name Laudantes Consort. Between 1995 and 2000, he devoted himself to this recorded series of 11 CD, which he carried out in collaboration with Jean Salkin, founder of the media library of Belgium.

The Laudantes Consort has a characteristically continental European choral sound, with more use of chest voice used discreetly to give a darker coloring to the sound. In this respect there are similarities to the Huelgas Ensemble except that their sound is much weightier and less refined. They also have a repertoire extending well outside of early music, making them something less than a specialist Early Music choir. In this wide ranging collection, they explore more than just the Franco-Flemish school for they start with the music that lead to its development in the French composers Machaut and the English Dunstable. They then go further to explore the composers whom they influenced including the Italian Palestrina, the English Tallis and Byrd, and the Spaniards Morales and Victoria.

If the greatest strength of this anthology is the sheer breath of the range they cover, it is also its greatest weakness. For example Morales gets a whole volume devoted exclusively to his music while arguably far more important composers such as Heinrich Isaac, and Pierre de la Rue barely get a mention - bar a chanson each, all two minutes worth of music. Nor does either Alexander Agricola or Jacob Obrecht - arguably the greatest of all composers of the Renaissance - get even a note in. Easily the most successful volume on this set is the one devoted to music by Nicolas Gombert with a complete recording of his Missa Beati Omnes along with several excellent motets. All of the Gombert is otherwise available only on this recording, which is possibly the most convincing recording of Gombert's music currently available, mostly because of the Laudantes Coonsrt make the fullest of the highly expressive - almost proto-Baroque - use of crashing dissonances. It really only makes you wish that this approach of recording complete versions of otherwise mostly unavailable music could have been carried over to the other volumes. There is an unfortunate trend to recording some works in extract so that only the Introitus of the Ockeghem Requiem is represented or just the Kyrie of a Lassus mass, just to name two examples. If would have been far preferable to record complete motets by another otherwise unrepresented composer to fill up a disc, as is done by Erik van Nevel in his set of CDs entitled `De Vlaamse Polyfonie'.

For most of us with an interest in Renaissance music acquiring this set will involve significant duplication of repertory. Fortunately, the Laudantes Consort usually has something interesting to say about even the most familiar works recorded here. Tone, intonation and clarity are all very good along with the technically excellent recorded sound throughout.

Unfortunately the CD-ROM (the 12th CD in the set) that comes with the set is for Mac OS8 and so is two generations behind making it unusable for most of us Mac users. The Windows version is for Win 98/95 but I cannot confirm if it is playable on a Win XP platform. Without the CD-ROM the printed booklet alone has scanty information on the music.

All in all I have to congratulate the Laundantes Consort for undertaking these recordings and accordingly award them five stars, despite some reservations. For overall this set remains very good value for the price and there are some genuinely exceptional things here - the Gombert volume is almost worth the price of whole set in fact. De Vlaamese Polyfonie would be my first choice overall, even though their recorded sound is inferior but Erik van Nevel is far more established an authority on Early Music with much experience behind him. This set by the Laudantes Consort is fortunatley far easier to obtain than Eufoda recordings which lack a consistent distributor.