LA DISSECTION D'UN HOMME ARMÈ

An experience not to be missed. The music is stunningly beautiful, and the Huelgas Ensemble sing and play so as to leave the listener with an impression of ease, fluidity and enjoyment.

This record, aptly entitled "La Dissection d'un Homme Arme", puts me in mind of Rembrandt's well-known painting "The Anatomy Lesson". Scalpel in hand, like the famous Dr Tulp, Paul van Nevel has made a series of delicate incisions into each of the six Masses contained in MS VI/E/40 of the Naples Biblioteca Nazionale. We, his pupils, as it were, are invited to observe how the anonymous composer has dealt with the five successive sections of the celebrated chanson, displaying them in their original form, by inversion, cancrizans, by stepwise progression up and down, in canon at the fifth below ... you name it, it's there! Then, in his final masterly demonstration, the surgeon ends his exposition by presenting us with the complete tune, as it appears in the last of the six Masses. Such a scientific analytical approach is a far cry from the somewhat stagemanaged approach of an 'authentic' liturgical reconstruction: we seem to have had a surfeit of these in recent years, and it is refreshing for once to return simply to the music itself as music, to scrutinize it with a new, clean objective look. Some selection was inevitable: it might have proved tedious simply to have recorded the six Masses in tow, and in any case this would have meant spilling over into at least three CDs. In the meantime, a discriminating choice has enabled Paul van Nevel to lay before us with clinical precision the underlying structure of bone, sinew and muscle found in every piece of the series. Indeed, this disc, with its concise, instructive insert notes, might well be a gift to any hardpressed lecturer seeking material to illustrate a course on fifteenth-century counterpoint.

It is, of course, much more than a teaching asset: the music is stunningly beautiful; structurally, the chanson could hardly be a better jumping-off point for polyphonic composition. The Huelgas Ensemble sing and play so as to leave the listener with an impression of ease, fluidity and enjoyment. The voices have too much individuality for a perfect blend, but their contrasts actually serve to enhance the liveliness of the performance. The choice of instrumentation, whether authentic or otherwise, helps to underscore the thrust and direction of the individual lines. One of the best moments is in the Sanctus of Mass IV, with the fine tone of the high voices well to the fore. And the best moment of all comes at the end, in the Credo of Mass VI, when two brisk voices sing the chanson for the last time, in canon, against a gentle backdrop of innocent jubilation from high-pitched recorders. If it has little in common with the text of the Creed, what matter? This is an experience not to be missed!

-- Gramophone [6/1991]