Nice late review by Stefano Russomanno for Spanish Scherzo Magazine of our EARTHQUAKE MASS CD!
"The singularity of the proposal does not tarnish the excellence of the performance and the boldness of an approach that seeks to enhance the imaginative mood of Brumel's mass.”
"In the interview included in the CD booklet, Björn Schmelzer does not hesitate to describe his approach as anti-historicist: ‘Historicism always takes the historical context as a reference and considers works of art as illustrations of this context; in contrast, I am interested in how works of art and music are at odds - or in rupture - with their context’. These statements serve very well to explain the present project. The starting point is the visionary 12-voice Missa ‘Et ecce terrae motus’ by the Flemish composer Antoine Brumel (c.1460-1512/13), in which the dense polyphonic framework creates a multitude of details around solid harmonic blocks, creating a sense of movement within statism.
Schmelzer associates these repeated sonic figurations with the noise of the falling of Christ's tombstone and finds similarities with the contemporary Resurrection of Christ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: the earthquake thus becomes a metaphor for catastrophe and natural disaster. To back up these suggestions, the members of Graindelavoix (eight voices and four instruments) are joined by the electric guitar - yes, you read that right: electric guitar - of Manuel Mota. Between the sections of the mass there are four instrumental pieces of contemporary authorship, whose electro-acoustic character and material consistency reach their fusion with the mass in the final Agnus Dei. Light years away from the purism of The Tallis Scholars (Gimell) or the Ensemble Clément Janequin (HMF), this new project by Schmelzer will probably find more followers among the avant-garde followers than among the fans of early music, but the singularity of the proposal does not tarnish the excellence of the performance and the boldness of an approach that seeks to enhance the imaginative mood of Brumel's mass.”
(Deepl translation)
