Huelgas Ensemble - The Magic of Polyphony (2020) [Hi-Res]

For almost 50 years the Belgian Huelgas Ensemble, under the direction of its founder Paul Van Nevel, has been setting standards with its recordings of vocal music, especially from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. With "The Magic of Polyphony", a new 3 CD recording is now available, on which masterpieces from six centuries can be heard and discovered. It contains highlights from six concerts which the Huelgas Ensemble gave in 2019 at the first edition of their own festival in the Burgundian village of Talant. The village, which is only a few kilometres away from Dijon, offers with its magnificent late Romanesque church Notre-Dame a unique and acoustically outstanding setting for the annual Pentecost Festival.

Among the highlights of the festival and thus of the recordings of madrigals, motets and chansons, among others, were the two "Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah", which were performed in two night concerts. On the one hand, the "Lamentations" by the Spaniard Fray José de Vaquedano, who was Kapellmeister at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela until his death in 1711, were heard. The other lamentations are penned by Orlandus Lassus, one of the leading composers of Franco-Flemish polyphony. Other great polyphonists, including lesser-known works from the late 15th and early 16th centuries, include Nicolas Gombert, Cipriano de Rore, Pierre de Manchicourt and Pierre de la Rue.

The Talant Festival also surprised with quasi-forgotten composers such as Giovanni Pietro del Buono, from whom a four-part "Obligo sopra Ave maris stella" can be heard. Also little known is Richard Loqueville, who was the teacher of the famous Guillaume Dufay in Cambrai. An important part of the Huelgas Festival in Talant are musical experiments. For example, the great Austrian romantic Anton Bruckner sang the four-part "Virga Jesse", which is outside the usual repertoire of the Huelgas Ensemble, both stylistically and in terms of instrumentation.

But these three CDs are not only an anthology of the first Huelgas Festival in Talant. As ensemble director Paul Van Nevel points out, they are "also a multifaceted documentation, a testament to six centuries of polyphonic music in Europe