Clemencic Consort & Rene Clemencic - Glogauer Liederbuch (2012)

The Glogauer Liederbuch, or Glogau Songbook, was compiled in or near the Silesian town of Glogau, now Glogow, Poland, around 1480. The history of the original manuscript is interesting in itself; during World War II it was moved out of Berlin and back to its hometown to protect it from Allied bombing. But then Glogau itself was more than 95 percent leveled, and the manuscript disappeared, only to resurface mysteriously in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow in 1977. The music is still rarely heard, even among Renaissance music lovers, and this release on the Oehms label contains notes and texts only in German and Polish. Even with these obstacles, the recording is both enjoyable and intriguing for speakers of any language. The Glogauer Liederbuch may have been the first collection of music to appear in partbooks. It was apparently compiled for a group of monks who enjoyed playing and singing themselves, and it by no means makes up the songs exclusively. A bit less than half of the pieces are instrumental, a remarkable proportion for 1480; they are mostly arrangements of secular songs or sacred polyphony. The vocal pieces are themselves "arrangements"; they have very simple tunes that would be called popular songs today, but they are contrapuntally treated with some subtlety. The result is a very appealing combination of simplicity and complexity. The venerable Clemencic Consort, using a small ensemble including recorder, cornett, a small organ, viols, and vielle or fiddle, conveys the "chamber" quality of the music clearly. One complaint here might be that the book contains multiple versions of some pieces (some of them taking off from each other), which really shows its purpose in showing off ingenuity in a context of appealing melodies, but Clemencic chooses not to include any of these multiples. Nevertheless, this is a good introduction to a delightful repertory largely untouched by ensembles from western Europe. -- James Manheim