The insert-notes describe Claude Le Jeune as a ''giant of French Renaissance music''; but France barely looms large on the late sixteenth-century musical map, and even her most interesting and prolific composers seem to cower in the shadow of their Italian, Flemish, Spanish and English counterparts. Admittedly Le Jeune still basks in a reputation of sorts, founded on his experimental use of neo-classical text-declamation. This wins his chansons a place in every history book, even if the settings themselves are almost never sung today. His church music (of which there is a copious quantity) by comparison remains almost wholly obscure. With the aid of this disc—yet another milestone in New College's continuing crusade on behalf of the darker corners of French early music—we can step a little closer to a proper evaluation of Le Jeune.
By far the most special piece is the Missa ad placitum, a five-part setting without reference to plainchant or a polyphonic model, and therefore something of a rarity for the time. Solid counterpoint opens and closes the work, in a style allied more to the economical, expressive manner of Lassus than to the luxuriant Roman polyphony of Palestrina or Victoria. In striking contrast, the Credo—an exercise in audacious chordal writing, full of chromatic twists and devious rhythms—accords much more with the received view of Le Jeune as an innovator and mouldbreaker.
Less satisfactory is the Magnificat. To be fair, this has less to do with the piece than the performance; and the performance in its turn has suffered from technical problems. The situation is as follows: Le Jeune follows age-old tradition by setting only the even-numbered verses of the text, leaving the remaining words either to be sung to plainchant or—the solution taken by Edward Higginbottom—replaced by organ versets, here the work of Jehan Titelouze. Even in a liturgical context the alternation of such different musical styles and performing forces invites discontinuity. When organ and choir have been recorded on separate days and in separate buildings, the chances of the performance achieving any real thrust are slender indeed. Had the splicing given a sense of quick-fire exchange, all could have been well. Instead, unnecessary pauses with an audible change of ambience mean that a product never fully emerges from its many (and individually fine) separate parts.
A Michaelmas motet, rather long-winded to my mind, acts as a buffer between Magnificat and Mass. Here, as throughout the recording, the lower voices are less clearly defined than the trebles, who sing with characteristic radiance but easily overwhelm their adult colleagues. To compensate, all three pieces include sections for reduced voices, and these give a truer account of the vocal talent New College currently boasts.'