Search - Gents, Dijkstra :: Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal

Delightful

Dr. Christopher Coleman | HONG KONG | 12/11/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Led by conductor Peter Dijkstra, the 14 voice male ensemble The Gents, hailing from the Netherlands, have a wonderfully rich tone quality, with perfect intonation and excellent ensemble. This, their second CD, The Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal, contains absolutely gorgeous singing. The particular imperial place of worship is that of Queen Elizabeth I, and the CD contains some twenty short pieces by composers such as Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Anthony Holborne, and the Italian father and son Alfonso Ferrabosco I and II. Featured with the Gents are the Diapente Viol Consort and Siebe Henstra on organ. The performances on this disc are all first-rate; not only are they as historically accurate as we can know, but more importantly for most of us, they are thoroughly satisfying both emotionally and musically. The pieces themselves are lovely. Those unfamiliar with Renaissance music will discover a purity of sound, a knowledge of harmony both rich and strange (listen to Robert Wyte's Antiphon for an example), and an emotional world at times transcendent, at times ineffably sad. There is no great Romantic spasm, and dynamics are limited but controlled. I've often wondered why more New Age fans haven't discovered this music--it shares, in the best sense, some of the same aesthetic. To a certain extent, it shares some of the same "sound" as well, in that the album was recorded in a church in the Netherlands that is highly reverberant, and I suspect that on top of that the recording engineer tweaked the echo a bit more.Although the majority of the music on the CD is religious, showing both the Catholic and Protestant influences, their composers also wrote music for entertainment. The viol consort (a family of early bowed stringed instruments) was a favorite ensemble to perform dance music, and three dance pieces are included. The consort has a lovely sound, so different from the modern strings. The Diapente Viol Consort is joined on two numbers by countertenor soloists, again, in wonderful performances. One piece is a fantasy for organ solo--to me it seems odd to include this work when nothing else on the CD includes any keyboard instrument. But this is the only criticism I have of the disc, and it is most minor, indeed. The Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal is a wonderful bit of work--my colleagues in the music department were asking about it after hearing it through my closed office door."