Antoine Brumel’s Missa “Et ecce terrae motus” (otherwise known as the “earthquake” mass) was justly famous during the composer’s lifetime and remains one of the true marvels of Renaissance choral writing, with its unusual scoring for 12 voices and for its carefully constructed melodic detailing against astonishingly long stretches of slowly-moving blocks of harmony. Although this work has absolutely nothing to do with earthquakes (its cantus firmus is taken from the Easter antiphon “And behold, there was a great earthquake”), if you want to be pleasantly, unforgettably “shaken”, just listen to this disc’s final eight minutes–the last part of the Agnus Dei. Nothing in all Renaissance music can surpass this for its sheer emotional power and impressive command of musical forces. And frankly, no composer before or since has so effectively sustained a text-based idea (Sibelius achieved a similar, orchestral result with the conclusion of his Second symphony), the closest being William Byrd or Vaughan Williams in their respective masses. You’ll know what I mean when you experience Brumel’s Agnus Dei, with its seemingly endless cascade of richly colored, dense-textured harmony, topped with swirling whirlpools of melodies, flavored with the reedy timbres of a choir of sackbutts and exclaimed by the very fine voices of Dominique Visse’s Ensemble Clément Janequin.
Which leads to the question: what are sackbutts doing here, and why are they muddying the texture of a work whose grandeur depends largely on our being able to discern the textural details? Another question: what edition (or editions) was used for that amazing Agnus Dei–here delivered in three parts–which exists only in a manuscript whose last folios (the Agnus Dei pages) are severely damaged? And was the six-voice “Copenhagen” version of the Et ecce terrae motus “Agnus Dei” used to fill out this performance? The notes are silent on all of these points.
However, there’s no denying the sonic splendour of most of the performance, or the technical or interpretive prowess of the singers and players. Time and again throughout this CD, I was just overwhelmed by the richness of the sound–those sackbutts really fill a room!–but at the same time I was disappointed by the saturation, the obscuring of detail, due to the presence of just too many “voices”. Nowhere are we given an explanation as to why the instruments are used–but at the same time, we can’t deny their purely theatrical benefits! For an unadulterated yet clearly detailed and musically scintillating performance (with the legitimate exclusion of instruments), go for the Tallis Scholars’ more distantly recorded rendition. But for sheer, glorious sonic revelry, this version is the one–and you won’t be sorry.
