Orlando Consort to Perform in Morrison Series

The four members of the Orlando Consort (photograph by Eric Richmond, courtesy of the Morrison Artists Series)

The second concert in the 2018–2019 season of the Morrison Artists Series, presented by the College of Liberal and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University (SFSU), will host a visit by the all-male vocal quartet that calls themselves the Orlando Consort. This group was formed in 1988 by the Early Music Network of Great Britain, and they have developed a repertoire organized around the half-millennium between 1050 and 1550. Historians tend to refer to this as the time of the High Middle Ages and the Late Middle Ages. For music historians, it is the time when polyphony emerged. This was followed by taking on the problem of coordinating multiple voices, which led to the initial developments of music notation as we now know it.

The Orlando Consort has prepared a program entitled The Ambassadors. It is structured into six sections, each of which is associated with a specific month and a specific venue as follows:

1. Duke Charles the Bold’s Encampment at the Siege of Neuss, May 1475
2. Eton College in Windsor (England), September 1479
3. The Court of Galeazzo Maria Sforza in Milan, November 1475
4. The Sistine Chapel in Rome, March 1508
5. The Casa del Cordon in Burgos, September 1506
6. Whitehall Palace in London, March 1533

Contributing composers include Josquin des Prez from the early sixteenth century and King Henry VIII, whose rule began during Josquin’s lifetime.

This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, October 26. The venue will be the McKenna Theatre, which is in the Creative Arts Building at SFSU, a short walk from the SFSU Muni stop at the corner of 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue. Tickets are free but advance registration is highly desirable. Reservations may be made through the event page for this concert. As usual, all of the ensemble members will give a collective Master Class, which will be held at 2 p.m. on the day of the performance. This two-hour session will also take place in the Creative Arts Building, and will be open to the general public at no charge and with no requirements for tickets.

The Brabant Ensemble Turns to Pierre de La Rue for its Latest Recording

The Brabant Ensemble is an a cappella choir based in Oxford and directed by Stephen Rice. Their repertoire focuses on early music and to date the group has released thirteen CDs on the Hyperion label, each focusing on a single composer. There is also a recording of selections from the so-called “Chirk Castle” partbooks, which include compositions by English composers such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. Tomorrow Hyperion will release Brabant’s latest recording (currently available for pre-order from Amazon.com), consisting entirely of works by Pierre de la Rue.

La Rue is one of those composers whose legacy owes much to the publication of his Mass settings by Ottaviano Petrucci. As many readers may know, the very first publication of the works of a single composer dates from 1502, when Petrucci published a series of Mass settings by Josquin dez Prez. This publication was so successful that Petrucci followed up with similar Mass collections of music by other composers the following year. La Rue was one of those composers, along with Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel, and Johannes Ghiselin. As the pioneer of the music publication business, Petrucci was more interested in getting content into circulation than in providing any background material; and, as Rice observed in his notes for the accompanying booklet, it is very difficult to attach dates to any of La Rue’s compositions with any certainty.

With that qualification in mind, Rice makes the case that the ordering of the two masses on his new recording is chronological. The earlier takes its thematic material from the Spanish song about an untrue lover “Nunca fue pena mayor” (never was there greater pain); and the later is based on the plainchant sequence “Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria” (inviolate, spotless and pure art thou, O Mary). (That sequence was set as a five-voice motet by Josquin.) Both La Rue compositions are set for four voices, as is his motet setting of the Marian antiphon “Salve regina” (hail queen), one of six existing settings by La Rue. The concluding selection is a Magnificat setting in Tone 6 set for five voices.

Information about La Rue’s life is about as sparse as evidence that would contribute to dating his works. However, we know that his most steady employment came from the Grande chapelle of the Burgundian-Habsburg court under Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Those familiar with the a cappella group Stile Antico will find one of La Rue’s motets (“Absalon fili mi”) on their harmonia mundi album From the Imperial Court: Music for the House of Habsburg. Rice has put together a far more extended account of La Rue’s music, which is certainly consistent with the representative albums he has prepared for other composers from the sixteenth century and earlier. Whether or not La Rue rises above any of the other composers from this period can be debated at length by those more scholarly, but he is definitely part of the landscape. That should be reason enough for him to be known for more than a single motet!