Scholars poking around in old manuscripts are always finding interesting things to share with eager performers and listeners. Often these gems are fragments and snippets that must be reconstructed or supplemented with texts and/or music presumed to be appropriate, based on contemporary practice and other authenticated evidence. There’s some of that here in this program that features two masses taken from the famous 15th century manuscript known as Brussels 5557, interspersed with several three-part songs from other sources of the same period. A Kyrie had to be supplied to the Walter Frye Missa Flos Regalis and confusing questions of text-setting had to be worked out for John Plummer’s Missa sine nomine; for some of the songs–by John Bedyngham, Frye, and anonymous–performance directions missing from the manuscripts had to be surmised. For experienced listeners to early vocal music, the masses will reveal their composers’ innovative and often bold and surprising techniques in both structure and harmony. The songs are interesting as representatives of pieces that were popular both in England and in continental Europe and as such were subjected to different text adaptations. Frye’s “Alas, alas, alas” is popular enough even today to merit inclusion on several recorded early music compilations already in the catalog.
The Clerks’ Group, which includes a total of seven singers used in various combinations, takes some time to warm up to its chosen program. The opening Frye mass lacks the convincing ensemble, decisive tempos, and confident vocal interplay demonstrated by the Hilliard Ensemble in its own rendition for ECM. The Clerks do hit their stride with the last two songs in a group of three by Bedyngham, “Fortune alas” (performed with male alto and two tenors) and “Mi verry joy” (female alto and two tenors); and the singers really come together in Plummer’s delightful and sometimes quirky mass, with its five almost exactly equal sections. Perhaps this agreeable music is just better-suited to the voices and sensibilities of these particular performers; perhaps it’s also the middle-to-lower register setting that makes it fall so well on our ears. Mike Clements’ excellent engineering also helps create a complementary listening environment for these pieces, which adequately fill several of the many holes in the early music discography.
