Doulce Mémoire & Denis Raisin Dadre - Du Caurroy: Requiem for the Kings of France & Les Meslanges (2008)

This album takes its title from that of a 1610 publication of works by Eustache du Caurroy, a court composer to three French kings of the later sixteenth century; "Les Meslanges" (or mélanges) means the mixture, and seems to refer to the assortment of genres contained therein. Du Caurroy is known sparsely in France and hardly at all elsewhere, but a disc like this shows how the repertoire of Renaissance music unearthed hitherto depended heavily on the interests of the small group of scholars who studied the music and made performing editions of it. Simply put, these pieces -- psalms, chansons, "cantiques spirituels" or spiritual songs, short instrumental pieces, and a uniquely French genre called Noëls -- are forgotten masterpieces.

Perhaps they were forgotten because du Caurroy was a conservative, compositionally speaking. Broadly speaking, scholars have focused in recent decades on the genres of this period that pointed toward the future -- in France, the so-called air de cour especially. These works look backward to the glories of Franco-Flemish polyphony, and they were published, shortly after du Caurroy's death, at his own expense, as a sort of musical last will and testament. They have something of the flavor of Bach's late-life contrapuntal masterpieces, which were well out of fashion by the time he wrote them -- or of the great English madrigals, which summed up and abstracted the best from a century of Italian practice. But du Caurroy's works look back to Josquin and his successors. They don't sound exactly like that music; in keeping with the practice of the periods, the vocal pieces are accompanied by a small group of recorders and viols. But the polyphonic writing, both assured and deeply expressive, is cut from the same cloth. The liner notes are a bit defensive about du Caurroy's secular chansons, but the defensiveness is unnecessary: the chansons have a unique combination of density and melancholy. They do not have the simple tragic feeling of a piece like Josquin's Mille regretz, but they are worked out in perfectly coordinated detail. The French group Doulce Mémoire delivers magnificent performances that seem to breathe. For lovers of Renaissance polyphony, this is a rare find.

Review by James Manheim