"Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix remain true to their path. Top class in their astonishing aesthetic consistency, and irreplaceable."
Exhaustive and interesting review of our new CD by Matthias Lange in klassik.com!
Read the German original here or the English translation below...
https://magazin.klassik.com/reviews/reviews.cfm...
When you pick up a record by Björn Schmelzer and his vocal ensemble Graindelavoix, you should not expect a repertoire piece that is interpreted in a state-of-the-art artistic style. The formation is always concerned with shedding new and unexpected light on relevant things, contextualizing them, and looking for what is more in the shadows. In all their interpretations, the conductor and ensemble consistently refuse to achieve vocal technical perfection - although all eight performers are professional and skilled in this respect - and, from Björn Schmelzer's point of view, merely supposed historical correctness and adherence to principles - after all, we know too little about the actual performance practice around 1500 to be able to place our own artistic work under the sign of what is definitely correct.
This also applies to the current production, which was published by Glossa under the title 'Earthquake Mass' and essentially contains an interpretation of the Missa Et ecce terrae motus by Antoine Brumel. Björn Schmelzer writes about his approach to Brumel's enigmatic masterpiece: 'If you take such extraordinary works seriously and as essential, you inevitably change the existing image of the past, and I am convinced that in doing so you also change your own time. This is the anti-historical position that I want to take with Graindelavoix: Historicism always takes the historical context and symbolic culture as a yardstick and sees works of art as illustrations of it, but I am interested in how works of art and music contradict or even break with their context.'
This way of thinking in broken perspectives is also inspired by the tradition of the Mass itself: the only surviving copy is affected by ink corrosion, so that not insignificant parts of the composition are illegible and need to be supplemented for a performance. Schmelzer solves this, as one already suspects, with a creative liberation: he structures the Mass movements through sometimes large-scale instrumental pieces of the most gradual development - the introductory 'Il Culto delle Pietre' lasts almost a quarter of an hour, a sound emanation of irritating flatness, controversially instrumented with serpent, cornett, two natural horns and electric guitar. The Portuguese guitarist and composer Manuel Mota proves himself here and in other, more concise sentences as a creative co-creator, in the context of art in times of disasters - Björn Schmelzer expands the network of relationships to include references to Pieter Bruegel and an Italian documentary film from the 1960s, but further explanations on this will be omitted at this point: it is about the music.
Unorthodox approach
This can also be said against the background of the complexity of thinking and conception: Brumel's mass has the typical Graindelavoix sound, grainy and expressive, occasionally playing with the effect of sound production under pressure, not impure, but in the constant search for sound also idiosyncratically ornamented, even glissanding, often drifting away restlessly. And yet the resulting sound structure never seems irritable, embedded in a constant, astonishingly safe flow that unfolds a very special magic. The voices of the two women and six men are incredibly strong in character and typical of the register; the basses stand out with all their darkness at the lower end of the sound spectrum. In the Agnus Dei, which is particularly affected by the damage to the surviving material mentioned above, gaps and cracks in the structure are made audible. Intonation is a special discipline in this context: the ensemble produces such a special sonority that primary assessments of this category - pure, free or floating - seem less important than the overall result. In the past, it has occasionally been pointed out that this special type of intonation is very similar to the practice of Marcel Pérès' Ensemble Organum - rough, raw, but coherent and with touching, seemingly archaic effects.
This is also the case here. The wind instruments that sound are intended to symbolize the moment of the apocalyptic and - in the form of serpent, cornet and horns - to sound as if it were 'anachronistic historicity'. They give the events colors, effects and moods, blend into the vocal sound in the instrumentally supplemented movements with flowing contributions, and formulate transitions between the spheres. Manuel Mota lets his electric guitar clear its throat harshly in a wide area, giving the serpent a grainy sound base - in its noise-like effect, it resembles a radio station that is not quite correctly tuned, as older people will remember.
Mota's music and his playing as a whole follow a sound installation approach that is more committed to the spherical effect than to the concrete, comprehensible, actually formulated musical form.
Instrumental areas
The tempi in the vocally dominated parts flow in a pleasingly fresh manner and are far from static; the almost still instrumental areas are in stark contrast to this. The recording, made live in Bern, is technically top-class all round: the sound is clearly illuminated down to the finest vocal movement; nevertheless, a warm harmony could be recorded, supported by moderate spatial expansion.The instruments are placed in an absolutely convincing relationship to the vocal sphere.
Anyone looking for 'classical' interpretations of the impressive Brumel Mass will be well served by the available interpretations by the Huelgas Ensemble or the Tallis Scholars. Here you are dealing with an idiosyncratic, individually contoured approach - also top-class in its astonishing aesthetic consistency, and also irreplaceable. Despite the excellent sound realization, the live experience of this highly contextualized sound concept might be preferable to the experience on recording. Björn Schmelzer and Graindelavoix remain true to their path.
