The Brabant Ensemble - Morales - Magnificat

****
An excellent recording, but there is a caveat
4 Oct 2008

Amazon reviews are a funny old business. My experience has led me to believe that people only really say reviews are helpful if they award a product five stars, and that more moderate reviews are either overlooked or deemed unhelpful. Perhaps people see a helpful review as one which confirms a decision they have already made, and anything which might cause them to reconsider is just a nuisance. I don't know. But despite my desire for popular reviews, I'm not going to award five stars, and I have a good reason for it. However, if you want a disc of outstanding music sung with precision, beauty of line and great taste, then look no further. Morales was the first great master of Spanish music, setting the stage for a century of musical splendour to match the apogee of the nation's star on the world stage, and his writing is moving, understated, emotionally intense and exquisite throughout. The Lamentations are real masterpieces, and the other motets distinctive and no less well crafted. Moreover, the singing by the Brabant Ensemble is of the highest order, well blended, tasteful and possessing a fine tone.

So why only four stars? Well, for the simple reason that this disc is yet another beautifully performed selection of polyphonic choral music by a professional ensemble consisting mostly of singers who began their careers at Oxbridge colleges. And there's the rub: this is, sadly, nothing new. There are now dozens of ensembles out there (and I have commented in another review on the practice drawing on a relatively limited pool of singers to make up the bulk of Britain's professional choirs), each of which promises to perform unjustly neglected music, but I must admit they are pretty hard to tell apart. With the exception of the fantastically barmy i fagiolini, they perform the repertoire in a very safe way, one that fits our preconceptions of how the music "should" sound.

So here is my challenge to the directors of Britain's early music groups: do something new! Yes, performance styles have changed over the past three decades, but surely now it's time to do something really radical with these "early dots". Be imaginative, outrageous even, but please don't give us any more of this sort of performance.