Orlande de Lassus. Missa pro defunctis - Prophetiae Sibyllarum / The Hilliard Ensemble
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ECM New Series 1658 (1993) | Renaissance
| "The appropriation of ancient pagan culture by Christianity is surely one of the most extraordinary ironies of western culture, and it is nicely symbolised by the Prophetiae Sybillarum of Orlando di Lasso and the Dies irae from the requiem mass, both of which refer to the sayings of the Sibyl, a mythical soothsayer whose origins are lost in the mists of antiquity. Lassus made two settings of the requiem, both which are hard to date on stylistic grounds because of the conservative nature of the genre. This recording is of the version published in 1578; it has low bass intonations, an odd feature which may have had something to do with the talents of a particular cleric, or been a response to some aspect of the Council of Trent whose deliberations came to a close in 1563. The Dies irae was one of four sequences to survive the Council, but as was customary at the time Lassus did not set it polyphonically. He certainly would have heard it chanted at the Munich chapel of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, where he was employed from 1556 until his death in 1594. The third line of the Dies irae contains the famous phrase 'teste David cum Sibylla', possibly a reference to the Erythraean Sibyl, which shows that the Sibylline legend was thriving in the mid-13th century when the sequence was written". |
MISSA PRO DEFUNCTIS
01 - Responsorium. Memento mei Deus [1:48]
02 - Introitus [6:12]
03 - Kyrie [3:19]
04 - Graduale [5:02]
05 - Offertorium [5:37]
06 - Sanctus & Benedictus [4:32]
07 - Agnus Dei [3:04]
08 - Communio [3:24]
09 - Antiphona. In paradisum [1:26]
PROPHETIAE SYBILLARUM
10 - Carmina Chromatico [1:36]
11 - Sibylla Persica [2:32]
12 - Sibylla Libyca [2:41]
13 - Sibylla Delphica [2:16]
14 - Sibylla Cimmeria [2:17]
15 - Sibylla Samia [1:55]
16 - Sibylla Cumana [2:16]
17 - Sibylla Hellespontiaca [2:07]
18 - Sibylla Phrygia [1:55]
19 - Sibylla Europaea [2:15]
20 - Sibylla Tiburtina [2:12]
21 - Sibylla Erythraea [2:26]
22 - Sibylla Agrippa [2:25]
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THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE
David James, countertenor
Rogers Covey-Crump, tenor
John Potter, tenor
Gordon Jones, baritone
"The Sibylline Prophesies were a gift from the young Lassus to his patron, and were not published until after the composer's death. Lassus, who was fluent in all the compositional techniques of his day, put aside extreme chromaticism and did not return to it. Such music, known as musica reservata, was unique, and performances were reserved for cognoscenti such as the king of France who was so astonished when he heard them in 1571. They are among the finest expressions of a renaissance musical ideal: an attempt to recover from an imagined past a fusion of rhetoric and chromaticism, in which Lassus stretched the compositional boundaries of his own time and laid down a challenge to performers of ours".
John Potter |
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