I’ve been expecting this disc for some time. I heard The Hilliard sing Lassus’s four-voice Requiem at the Saintes Festival in 1989, and this recording was made nearly five years ago. Lassus composed another setting for five voices; both works have been recorded by Pro Cantione Antiqua (on a two-disc set), and between their recording of the four-voice work and this one there is little to choose. Both ensembles sing one to a part, and the sound of each is conditioned partly by the tone of their altos (respectively Timothy Penrose and David James), each in his own way restrained and plangent. But PCA sing a semitone lower than The Hilliard, which considerably alters the scoring: Gordon Jones’s counterpart is Michael George, and there is a world of difference between a baritone and a bass. PCA’s singers are customarily freer with their vibrato than The Hilliard, but this hardly affects their intonation. I found myself more involved with PCA’s darker reading (the work is scored for relatively low clefs by Lassus’s standards), but The Hilliard’s will certainly not disappoint their admirers. For what it’s worth, PCA (but not The Hilliard) include the plainsong Sequence Dies irae whose mention of the Sibyl (“teste David cum Sybilla”) provides the only conceivable link with the next work on this recording.
The Prophetiae Sibyllarum were written about 20 years before the Requiem by a youthful Lassus intent on demonstrating his proficiency in the chromatic bag of tricks unleashed by the avant-garde. To my ear the music doesn’t sound nearly as weird as Lassus may have wished: beneath the startling shifts on the surface its harmonic design is far from iconoclastic. But it is certainly very different from its companion work on this disc. The Prophetiae occupy a grey area between the sacred and the secular, and seem to call for a flexible, text-driven, even declamatory approach; yet the manner of performance here is practically identical to that of the Requiem. That may be to do with the resonant acoustic so prized by The Hilliard: it does wonders in the Requiem, but in the Prophetiae its ambient glow seems to waft the notes out of the singers’ reach. Surely these chromaticisms are intended to destabilize the tactus, or (at the very least) imbue it with greater fluidity – otherwise they sound rather contrived. The reading from Cantus Colln (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 7/94 – nla) seems nearer the mark. It goes almost without saying that The Hilliard’s is very accomplished, but the want of a clear distinction between genres robs the disc of the intended contrast between works: strange bed-fellows indeed.'