This, the fourth recording of an early Renaissance Requiem setting I’ve reviewed in as many months, follows closely on the heels of the first complete recording of the piece, issued a year ago by Ensemble Doulce Mémoire on the Zig-Zag label under the name of a different composer, Antoine de Févin. Could this have anything to do with the fact that the same parent company owns both labels, I wonder? Different sources give the work to either, and Marcel Pérès puts the case for Divitis’s authorship with his customary assertiveness in his notes, but it is the approach in the studio that convinces. Rarely have two readings of a Renaissance work been so different in character yet comparable in quality.

Where Denis Raisin Dadre opts for a mixed ensemble of voices and instruments, Pérès goes it with voices alone; but what voices! Antoine Sicot, Ensemble Organum’s basso profundo since its inception, doubles the bass-line at the octave below and is entrusted with some of the plainchant intonations. But the result is far more convincing, because more subtly done, than when a Paul van Nevel does the same kind of thing. (Besides, Sicot’s is an astonishing voice.) Pérès himself intones the readings from St Paul and the Gospel, and one needn’t be religiously inclined to find these very moving.

If Doulce Mémoire have a slight edge in terms of ensemble sound, Organum’s individual voices offer something equally special. This comes across in the polyphony, since there are extended duos in the work’s middle movements. Whoever composed it, it impresses me more and more. Do listen.