"At midnight on the same Saturday, at the Janskerk, his favorite theater of operations in Utrecht, Graindelavoix took us to the exact opposite extreme: musical interpretation understood as a whimsical, almost irreverent exercise in postmodernity that tries to pass off as authentic, but It's nothing more than a gross hoax. Björn Schmelzer and his henchmen (seven singers and two lutenists) systematically shredded several works by the princeps musicorum, Josquin des Prez, a robbery made especially painful by the greatness—and helplessness—of the victim. The essence of the compositional and interpretive postulates of Renaissance polyphony is subverted in this extremely free approach in which the texture, the wonders of imitative counterpoint or the texts (sometimes simultaneously in two languages) become a viscous mush with bumps in form of repeated tics ad nauseam: score in hand, it is not easy to even know what compass we are in, such is the indigestible sound concoction that reaches our ears. Johannes Ockeghem must have turned over in his grave when he heard Nymphes de bois, a déploration in his memory, reduced to rubble, and its author, Josquin des Prez, had to do the same while the attack on O mors inevitabilis was perpetrated, an equivalent planto after his death composed by Hieronymus Vinders. The incipit of Josquin's latest chanson was prepared for the occasion: Regretz sans fin. Piece after piece, wonder after wonder, hearing this unique music thus dismantled produced infinite, endless sorrow. Fortunately, the concert, a few hours before, by Sébastian Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances acted as an antidote to be able to forget the hoax as soon as possible and long remember what was memorable."
Luis Gago, El País, 5 September 2022 (English version: google translate)
https://elpais.com/cultura/2022-09-05/hasta-la-vista-carl-philipp-emanuel-bach.html
