Apparently, there actually is such a condition as too much of a good thing, even for the most hedonistic Renaissance music fan. Dedicating a whole album to Andrea Gabrieli, the uncle of the far more famous Giovanni Gabrieli (with whom he played organ at St. Mark’s in Venice), is an interesting prospect. His Majesty’s Consort of Voices and His Majesty’s Sagbutts and Cornetts take us on a quick tour of the elder Gabrieli’s output: the entire Pater peccavi Mass, some motets and a madrigal, a few instrumental works. The compositions selected here are uniformly lovely: florid and ornately decorated, but not exactly risk-taking works–Andrea wasn’t much of a boat rocker.
But the operative word here is indeed “uniformity” despite conductor Timothy Roberts’ best efforts to the contrary. The mass portions are broken up by other works; the program alternates between instrumental and vocal selections; and although Roberts and his forces play with varying configurations of voices per part and instrumentation there’s still a certain sameness to the overall flavor that can’t be denied. These are velvety readings, to be sure, but a whole disc of that richness becomes dull. (Diving in for delicious bits here and there is another story.) The intrinsic lushness isn’t helped by the very muffled sound: the six-member Consort of Voices might as well be a cast of thousands, given the total opacity of the recording.
