(Hit the back button on your browser to return to product listing.) American Record Guide This is the third of Kevin Moll's superb releases for Lyrichord with his Discantus group. It is offered in rather misleading packaging, under the title of "Echoes of Jeanne d'Arc", with art and notes glorifying the Maid of Orleans, and with the music involved and its composer in notably small print. Perhaps that is to help sell otherwise obscure merchandise. Almost nothing is known about Reginaldus Liebert, or Libert. There is an apparent reference to him in 1424, and his major surviving work, a three-voice Mass, may have been performed at a documented event in 1431Ðthe year Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. As the notes admit, Liebert's career would have identified him with the realm of Burgundy, Joan's enemy, so the forced connections are altogether moot. The true justification for this release is simply the patent importance of this shadowy but interesting composerÐwhose complete surviving works (other than secular chansons attributed to him) are contained on this disc. The four-voice Kyrie acts as an epilogue to the bulk of the material, which is a Mass cycle, setting polyphonically not only the standard texts of the Ordinary but also six propers and the concluding Ite missa est. Such a "Plenary Mass" (as the form is called) is unusual but not unknown in the early 15th Century. The best known counterparts are two Masses by Guillaume Dufay: his 4-voice St. James Mass and his putatively reconstructed St. Anthony Mass. Liebert's setting is for three voices, the top and bottom ones in strict counterpoint, the middle voice more florid, in a fashion that has been compared to the "flamboyant Gothic" in architecture of this period. The writing is elegant, accomplished, and hypnotically fascinating. Alert to the dangers of monotony, Moll has his five singers introduce some subtle variations: normally, they are distributed three to the to part and one each to the other two, but sometimes they alter that combination. In the Credo, where the lower voices are untexted in the manuscript (something easily remedied when it occurs elsewhere), a single singer delivers the texted upper voice while the other two parts are vocalized wordlessly. One might quibble about the inclusion of two women among the group, but all blend in a vibrato-less cohesion of ensemble that, matched with excellent energy and rhythmic vitality, recreates this potentially austere music with great beauty. This is, then, a release of great importance for the medieval discography. Liebert's masterpiece belongs to the first stage of the Mass's emergence as the supreme form of art-music composition in the final heyday of Gothic civilization, on the threshold of the Renaissance. We have had few recorded examples from this stage other than Dufay. Collectors of early music will ignore this at their peril. Glowing recording sound; elaborate notes, with Propers texts and translations. -Barker, March 1997 |