Sequentia’s two recent releases, “Shining light” and “Aquitania”, offer two-and-a-half-hours of enthralling listening. They complement each other in their exploration of a particularly rich and rewarding repertoire of twelfth-century music, illustrating the general topic of the season of Christmas. These joyful songs, both monophonic and polyphonic, reveal the message of the Incarnation as it bursts upon the world in the darkness of winter – the realization and fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies in the person of Christ – in simple language interwoven with biblical allusions, but with a depth of understanding too often absent from the secular jollities of twentieth-century worship. The booklet sheds light on both the music and the texts: Peter Dronke’s notes on the latter – for example, his discussion of St Augustine’s rendering of the Sibyl’s verses – are particularly fascinating.
The two vocal groups of Sequentia, Sons of Thunder and Vox Feminae, are given just the right pieces to suit their male or female timbre and range. One piece I particularly enjoyed was the serene meditation on the theme of Rorate celi by the women, Divinum stillant, with its quiet refrain “Grief turns into our joy ... the dark night radiates”. Sequentia’s use of instruments is unusually creative in the interludes and rarely intrusive during the singing: I think the balance is just about right. Twenty years earlier, Konrad Ruhland’s approach is totally different: the melody instruments merely doubling the tune and those accompanying simply reiterating obvious patterns. This, too, would seem perfectly justifiable – especially for a more popular type of repertoire, which is exactly what we have in the Christmas Cantiones from the Moosburg Graduale of 1360.
“Christmas”, the Ruhland remastering (though not entirely restricted to that season), was well worth the effort. It is all roisterous good fun, Christmas cheer performed with tremendous verve, well calculated to produce the ‘medieval sound’ that goes with Christmas trees, holly and mistletoe. It is nearly all in 6/8 and there is a lot of major mode, and it includes such famous items as Resonet in laudibus: you know the sort of popular repertoire. It’s just the sort of CD that one needs as background music for the office Christmas drinks party. Sadly, no texts are given, but, luckily for us, the singers do articulate extremely well.
I had the impression that the collection might have been thrown together rather hastily, and that economy had had its part to play. Not so for the two Sequentia discs with their 54-page booklets: in general these reveal how much care and thought have gone into the preparation, and it was surely an understandable slip on the part of the proof-readers that two verses of Gaudia debita were accidentally omitted.'