It must have been difficult to find a suitable programme to follow the Gabrieli Consort’s triumphant recording of Victoria’s Requiem (Archiv, 12/95), but with this disc of Morales’s Missa Mille regretz this has certainly been achieved, and with a logical connection to the previous release.
To begin at the beginning, expecting that the instrumental canciones by Guerrero and Rogier (transcribed from the Lerma manuscript by Douglas Kirk) which open the disc would be merely padding, I was delighted to hear playing of such sensitivity: one can understand why instrumentalists were so prized in Spanish cathedrals at this time if they played like this. Morales’s Mass itself (performed, like the Victoria, by an all-male consort) is sung splendidly. There is a real feeling for the work’s direction (not easily discerned in music so seamlessly polyphonic as Morales) which, in combination with the seductively rich sonority of the choir, make it a performance of genuine stature. My only reservations concern the stodgy singing of the “Hosanna” which would surely benefit from a lighter, more rhythmic approach. The Almaviva recording of the same Mass made by the Hilliard Ensemble has long been a favourite of mine, and it has the advantage of including the alternative settings of the Sanctus and Agnus Dei (and the disadvantage of the irritating omission of much musica ficta). Its intimate appeal is of course quite different from the massive blaze of sound we hear on this recording.
The plainchant is for the feast of St Isidore of Seville, taken from unspecified sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources by Robert Snow. It is sung (again as on the Victoria disc) accompanied by a dulcian, as indeed is the polyphony, common Spanish practice of the time. Instruments and choir come together only in Guerrero’s motet, O Doctor optime, sung at the Offertory, which is an object lesson in how to achieve blend and balance. Another cancion by Rogier acts as a recessional, and the disc closes with a short piece by Tomas de Santa Maria followed by a magnificent performance of Morales’s motet Emendemus in melius. I have no more superlatives. Buy this disc. '