This is the third recording of Josquin from A Sei Voci in recent years. The ensemble habitually belies its name, expanding its forces as occasion demands. Here, it swells to a cast of dozens, being joined by two renaissance wind bands and the choir of Notre-Dame in Paris. This change of tack comes as something of a surprise, given the success of A Sei Voci’s previous recordings of Josquin; it is a broader-brushed approach, a public ceremony, perhaps (as suggested by the accompanying motet by Johannes Martini, written for the wedding of Duke Ercole I d’Este in 1473), whereas the recordings by the Hilliard Ensemble or the New London Chamber Choir present chamber, all-vocal performances of the Mass, say, in the music-loving Duke’s private chapel. Now, the combination of voices and instruments works very well in a ceremonial context, as Paul McCreesh’s ceremonial reconstructions have clearly shown; but here I cannot help feeling that more is actually less.
It is primarily a question of casting. The Maitrise of Notre-Dame sing with restraint and balance when left on their own. The Miserere moves along nicely without sounding rushed, or for that matter overly sombre, but in the Mass the group’s capacity to project both the text and music (what one might call the rhetorical weighting of lines) is less than that of their professional counterparts – and the soloists drawn from the choir cannot always match the singers of A Sei Voci. Furthermore, the use of instruments accentuates an occasional lack of clarity in an over-distant acoustic. It also leads to puzzling formal decisions. The Kyrie is treated as a nine-fold invocation with alternating plainsong, with certain polyphonic statements being given to the instruments alone; the beginning of the Sanctus is played twice, once with instruments, once with the entire ensemble; and the canonic Agnus Dei II is purely instrumental. This approach is reminiscent of the Clemencic Consort in its heyday. The Agnus Dei III is a fine example of this: a slow build-up from a couple of voices to a quasi-symphonic sound at the end: very stealthily and skilfully done, and undeniably impressive – though I would have been more convinced had the details elsewhere been equally firmly in place.
Still, the absolute contrast with other recordings of the Hercules Mass might provide an alternative (say) to the Hilliard Ensemble, whose programme also includes the Miserere (albeit in a less positive performance; perhaps Herreweghe strikes the finest balance here). Sadly, the edition of the Mass used by A Sei Voci is deficient in at least one respect. Willem Elders’s accompanying note cautions against the use of incorrect resolutions of the canonic Agnus Dei II. The problem is that this recording uses precisely one of these faulty versions. Ironically, the Hilliard’s recording (EMI, 5/90 – nla, whose future reissue on the Virgin label seems likely) uses a much more plausible solution supplied by... Willem Elders. So the present disc is a rewarding second choice, but a second choice none the less.'