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| Label Challenge Classics |
UPC 0608917287721 |
Catalogue number CC 72877 |
Release date 14 May 2021 |
""What actually transpires through the course of listening is that this series is arguably something far more special than a catalogue raisonné of the choirbooks' contents, and perhaps equally monumental." "Listeners who have seen the Cappella Pratensis perform in person or online will be aware that improvised polyphony is not the only aspect of historically informed performance in which they are currently leaders in the field." "Throughout the first three volumes of this series the quality of performance, interpretation and recording is superb, but the fourth instalment is certainly its crowning glory." "As a whole, the series to date is a masterclass in how scholarly study can be used to craft exciting and exuberant programmes.""
Early Music, 10-9-2024Cappella Pratensis specializes in the music of Josquin Desprez (= Josqinus Pratensis) and other polyphonic composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The ensemble performs its own programs and original interpretations, which are based on academic research. As was customary in the renaissance, the singers of Cappella Pratensis usually stand around a central music stand, singing from facsimiles of original choirbooks. This creates a unique perspective on the repertoire. The ensemble, founded in 1987, is now under the artistic direction of singer and conductor Stratton Bull.
In addition to regular concerts in the Netherlands and Belgium, Cappella Pratensis performs in leading international festivals and venues in France, Portugal, Germany and the United States. The ensemble also has also released several CD recordings which have been greeted with rave press reviews and awards, including the Diapason d’Or and the Prix Choc. From 2005 to 2007, Cappella Pratensis was ensemble-in-residence at the Fondation Royaumont (France), where it gave courses and concerts, and worked with several prominent musicians. In 2009, it released a DVD/CD production of the Missa de Sancto Donatiano by Jacob Obrecht, which contained a reconstruction of the first performance of this mass, filmed on location in Bruges, supplemented with extensive documentation. This production was awarded with a Diapason découverte and the highest rating in the professional magazine Classica.
The CD Vivat Leo! Music for a Medici Pope (2010), directed by guest conductor Joshua Rifkin, was awarded a Diapason d’Or. A successful series of concerts of the Requiem of Pierre de la Rue was led by guest conductor Bo Holten. A DVD of one of these concerts, performed as part of the event Jheronimus Bosch 500, was released in 2010 under the title Bosch Requiem.
In January 2012 a new CD, containing the earliest surviving polyphonic requiem masses in music history, those by Johannes Ockeghem and Pierre de la Rue. In February 2014 the ensemble released a CD containing music written for the feast of the Assumption and transmitted in choirbooks from the Vatican, including Josquin Desprez’s masterpiece Missa Ave maris stella. In late 2015, the ensemble recorded the Missa Cum Jocunditate by Pierre de la Rue.
In 2016, Cappella and the Nederlands Kamerkoor performed eight concerts of the world premiere of the Missa Unitatis, composed in 2008 by Anthony Pitts (* 1969) in a unique partnership with choirs in Antwerp, Breda, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Eindhoven, Tilburg and Helmond. It has also performed during the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, and presented five performances of the program Christmas with Josquin in the Season of Early Music.
Cappella Pratensis shares its vision and approach to vocal polyphony with professionals and amateurs in masterclasses, with multimedia presentations, and also in a week-long summer school that takes place annually during the festival Laus Polyphoniae in Antwerp. In a structural collaboration with the universities of Leuven and Oxford, the musical manuscripts of the workshop of Petrus Alamire are explored by musicologists and adapted for use by other musicians.
Pierre de la Rue was a true Belgian: born in Tournai, he worked the first decades of his life in Brussels, Ghent and 's-Hertogenbosch, and spent his final years in Kortrijk. All the while, he only ever took one position as a composer, at the Flemish Chapel of the Burgundian court. There, he developed himself into a prolific composers, who wrote a large number of missas, motets and chansons. In these works, he shows his virtuosity particularly in the use of complex counterpoint. He wrote, for example, complete four-voiced missas based on a single melody.
De la Rue was also one of the first to compose polyphonic Requiems as a unique cycle of compositions in different keys based on the magnificat. Strangely, Pierre de la Rue's music is generally less known than the music by Josquin and his other contemporaries, yet there are just as many gems to discover in his body of work!
"What actually transpires through the course of listening is that this series is arguably something far more special than a catalogue raisonné of the choirbooks' contents, and perhaps equally monumental."
"Listeners who have seen the Cappella Pratensis perform in person or online will be aware that improvised polyphony is not the only aspect of historically informed performance in which they are currently leaders in the field."
"Throughout the first three volumes of this series the quality of performance, interpretation and recording is superb, but the fourth instalment is certainly its crowning glory."
"As a whole, the series to date is a masterclass in how scholarly study can be used to craft exciting and exuberant programmes."
Early Music, 10-9-2024
He restores here with perfect transparency a counterpoint of exceptional density, which does not eschew
dissonances (Kyrie), and the sometimes tortuous melodic designs.
Diapason, 01-10-2021
The five-part series about the Den Bosch choirbooks starts with a de la Rue-Mass of disarmingly high quality, embedded in a coherent liturgy format: sympathetically brought to life by Stratton Bull and Cappella Pratensis in the literal sense of the word.
Klassik.com, 12-7-2021
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