Since starting making recordings for Glossa in 2007 Dominique Vellard has been demonstrating the broad range of interests which have been so influential over the thirty years of the career of his Ensemble Gilles Binchois and which help to make up this complex musical personality. From the earliest polyphonies interspersed with Gregorian Chant (in L’Arbre de Jessé and the reissued Music and Poetry in St Gallen) to 21st century compositions from Vellard himself and Jean-Pierre Leguay (in Vox nostra resonet and Motets croisés) by way of the 17th century polyphony of Monteverdi, Schütz and Frescobaldi, some of the facets of Vellard’s continuing interest in religious music have been reflected on the label.
To these Vellard now adds a recording devoted to a Spanish 16th century composer in Francisco de Peñalosa who the tenor and director rates as highly as Josquin Desprez. As well as containing a magisterial work in the Missa Nunca fue pena mayor, about which Vellard has been considering in performance across his career, the CD contains motets and hymns, and the Memorare piissima (over which scholars have long debated its precise attribution). This new release comes graced with both a striking image from the Descent from the Cross painting by a contemporary of the composer in Pedro Machuca as well as a thoughtful essay from leading scholar Tess Knighton.
These days, Dominique Vellard is also frequently performing secular music, especially of a traditional nature and from different cultures, and his musical insights are appearing in concert (recently with Vox Suavis) and also on his previous Glossa disc, L’Amor de Lonh. Here, we take the opportunity to catch up with the ever-busy Dominique Vellard and his reflections on the music he performs.
You have recorded medieval secular monophony, the music of the troubadours and trouvères, only very rarely across the history of the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. How did you approach such music with your recent album L’Amor de Lonh?
It is true that we have recorded little from the courtly repertoires of the 12th and 13th centuries before, apart from Les Escholiers de Paris, which was released on Harmonic Records. It seemed to us essential beforehand to be deeply immersed in the liturgical repertoires which were contemporary with them, and at the same time to be nourished by the many experiences which we have been able to share with musicians involved in the oral tradition and performing repertoires which have been able to demonstrate plentiful parallels and analogies for us. When I was a young musician there was a great danger in envisaging that repertoire in a simple-minded way or, more seriously still, in considering it as the continuance of a certain recording tradition. Musically, the repertoire is unequal, even if there are certain masterpieces within it. Furthermore, the notation supplies only a small amount of information for the purpose of performance. So, all in all, it was important for us to wait for the right moment!
What idea did you have in mind when putting the new album (L’Amor de Lonh) together?
The disc has been shaped around the literary theme of “l’amor de lonh” (or “love from afar”) which can be found in music of a great diversity, across different languages as well as varying vocal and accompaniment styles – and we made use of French, Occitan and Spanish traditions for this. Moreover, the recording acts as a kind of mosaic, with learned and popular chansons following on from one another and within all this the modality insures both the continuity and the unity of the project.
For your recent recordings on Glossa you appear to be involving a variety of different singers in the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. How does this work?
For quite some time now the Ensemble has been endeavouring to bring together musicians who would appear to be best-suited for responding to the demands of any specific area of music and who, at the same time, can best relate to the aesthetic which the Ensemble has developed over its thirty years of existence. The result is that we have formed a group of “sub-ensembles” covering for courtly song, chansons from the 15th and 16th centuries, Gregorian chant and the earliest polyphonies plus a more substantial group of singers to perform polyphony of the 16th century and church music of the 17th century.
Back in 1996, you recorded Music and Poetry in St Gallen and this has now been reissued on Glossa. What do you recall of studying and performing this extremely early repertory? How straightforward was it to consider performing music from the 9th century?
Preparing and recording this disc turned out to be rich, enthralling and deeply-involved experience and one that had arisen from a long collaboration with the German musicologist Wulf Arlt. What we were trying to achieve with this programme was to create a faithful image of the incredible intellectual and musical abundance of the Abbey of Saint-Gall between the 9th and 11th centuries; this includes the richness of the rhythmic notation of the early Gregorian sources and the sheer inventiveness and creativity obvious in the composition of the tropes and sequences. (The work involved in the “rhythmization” of the sequences proved to be of an extraordinarily delicate nature in order to be able to reconcile the reading of the neumatic indications, the need for a fluidity in the Latin phrasing and in the naturalness of the melodic shapes).
Outside your projects and performances with the Ensemble Gilles Binchois you often team up with other groups and performers – such as with Vox Suavis. What interests you in participating with such artists?
The experience that I have with Vox Suavis is complementary to that which we are carrying out with the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. I am frequently asked to take part in concerts with performers of traditional music, who may be Indian, Moroccan, Iranian or Breton. In these encounters we compare our traditions, we allow them enter into dialogue with each other whilst remaining within our respective areas of knowledge. With the ensemble Vox Suavis I am offered the possibility of directly confronting traditional Spanish music, which is one of the richest in Europe. Together firstly with Ana Arnaz and then with Baptiste Romain, I have had the opportunity to work on the field recordings made by Kurt Schindler in the 1930s and by Alan Lomax and García Matos in the 1950s along with editions of chansons which had been collected and written down from the start of the 20th century (begun by Felipe Pedrell). Our desire is to allow vocal styles and repertoires which have totally disappeared to be heard today and also to compare them to Spanish medieval monodies.
What inspired you to turn to the music of the Spanish composer from the start of the 16th century Francisco de Peñalosa for your latest Glossa release (Missa Nunca fue pena mayor), and how did you find the experience of working with Les Sacqueboutiers?
Peñalosa is for us a composer of extreme importance and even if his work is not so copious in size, it has to be placed on the same level as that of Josquin Desprez. In the very first years of the 16th century Peñalosa established the rules of what would become the ideal aesthetic of the Renaissance: quality of the prosody of the discourse, balance and naturalness of the counterpoint, richness of the sonority. He is a “classic” of the Spanish Renaissance, long before Cristóbal de Morales and, without exception, his Masses, Magnificats and motets are key works, indeed hits! Making this disc with Les Sacqueboutiers was a real and a great pleasure; these musicians possess a completely unique art in how to make the polyphony sound and to mix the instrumental timbres with the voices.
by Mark Wiggins © 2011 MusiContact / Glossa Music