Lurking suspicion that Jan Peeterzoon Sweelinck is a true doyen of sacred vocal music is emphatically confirmed in an important and invigorating world premiere recording of the complete 1619 Cantiones Sacrae. This collection of 37 motets in five-voices demonstrates, above all, the quality of the Dutchman’s aesthetic, one in which textual representation and pure contrapuntal pleasure converge with effortless mastery; you only have to hear the first minute of the first track, a quasi-introit, ‘Gaudete’, of infectious energy, to dance to its affirmative and buoyant rhythms and bask in the clarity of the harmonic conception. As Timothy Brown conveys in his informative note, Sweelinck has long been highly regarded by musicologists but underappreciated by musicians (if I can make that mischievous distinction). Whilst the monumental Psalms of David represents a greater range of Sweelinck’s undeniable command of variegated idiom, Cantiones Sacrae projects a distinctive containment, both in scale and emotional judgement, which should appeal to choirs of all shapes and sizes – and listeners too; drawing close parallels with William Byrd can be a hazardous exercise, though there is some common territory, borne out by biography, that Sweelinck survived as a Catholic in a Protestant working environment. By turning to the Roman vulgate in later years for his texts, as he does here, Sweelinck mirrors Byrd’s own practice in the Gradualia, if far less methodically. As these pieces would not, therefore, have adorned the liturgy, their use was most likely limited to domestic situations and the Collegium Musicum in Amsterdam, an institute founded especially to promote Sweelinck’s compositions.
These performances by the young, effervescent voices of Clare College Choir, Cambridge are impressive not simply because they bring an immediacy and vitality to this music but because there is an intensity and acute observation of detail which requires both supreme concentration and a feeling for meticulous ‘Dutch’ order, detailed characterization which operates from ‘the middle out’, like a Vermeer oil painting. Sweelinck’s theatricality is hardly the self-congratulatory sort, though the grandeur and nobility of expression in ‘Vide homo’ and the constrained chromatic inflexions of ‘O Domine Jesu Christe’ (or distinctly ‘baroque’ harmonic direction of ‘Cantate Domine’) to name a few, is profoundly affecting on its own terms.
Timothy Brown expertly circumnavigates his disciplined larger forces of about 26 voices around an oeuvre which is at once both introspective and ecstatic. The smaller-scale consort is perhaps a little less polished, the tuning of the sopranos has a tendency to ‘dip’ intermittently, and there is an occasional ‘piping kettle’ quality to the timbre. Generally, too, the lack of colorific range and resonance belies the youthful membership of the choir; this can be telling in some of the slower music where prettiness tends to prevail above projection of sentiment. These are small gripes in a project which stands out for a pioneering place in the catalogue and its fine advocacy of Sweelinck’s seemingly unlimited resource. A strong recommendation.'