About the discography by James Jolly
Paul McCreesh doesn't just make recordings, he creates events. If you don't believe me, just close your eyes while you play the Gabrielis' recording of Biber's Missa Salisburgensis, or 'A Venetian Christmas', or even Bach's St Matthew Passion. Not only will your ears be struck by the richness of the sound and the conviction of the playing and singing, but your imagination will kick in and you'll find yourself at the heart of a great occasion. If it's the Biber you've chosen (and if you're lucky you'll be listening to the surround-sound SACD) the music will be echoing and re-echoing around you, the Abbey Church of SS Mary and Ethelflaeda in Romsey standing in for the equally magnificent acoustic of Salzburg Cathedral circa 1682. You'll be part of an extraordinary re-creation of the Mass performed to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of Salzburg's establishment as a centre of Christianity, and I defy anyone to remain unmoved by the sheer splendour of the musical achievement and the ambition of the project.
Paul McCreesh and his Gabrieli Consort & Players first appeared on record enthusiasts' radar in 1990 with a disc for Virgin Classics entitled 'A Venetian Coronation 1595'. It was a real ear-opener, a re-creation of what might have been heard when a new Doge was being enthroned in Venice, drawing on works by Giovanni Gabrieli and his uncle Andrea, the composers who lent their name to McCreesh's bands of musicians. This was not arrogant scholarship masquerading as music-making - McCreesh justified his approach to Gramophone at the time by pointing out that 'reconstructions can illuminate the music - even with the inevitable loose ends, the overall effect will be greater than the sum of the component parts' - but it was a vivid example of how scholarship can inform and stimulate today's musicians to a level of creativity and imagination that can have a similar effect on listeners be they from the 16th or 21st centuries. And such was the excitement created by this recording that it not only won a Gramophone Award that year but also persuaded Deutsche Grammophon's early-music Archiv label that McCreesh and his musicians should be welcomed aboard (and they've recorded for Archiv ever since).
There are a number of strands that run through the Gabrielis' discography but one unifying theme is the mood of celebration, be it the unbridled joy of Christmas festivities like 'A Venetian Christmas' (a glorious weaving together of music by Giovanni Gabrieli and Cipriano de Rore), Palestrina's Missa Hodie Christus Natus Est, and Handel's Messiah, or the darker reds and golds of Morales's Mass for the Feast of St Isidore of Seville, or even the intensity of Victoria's Requiem, which celebrates a spiritual union between man and God that really does inspire a sense of awe in its listeners. But what I find so totally engaging about these recordings is that coming-together, as if in a musical crucible, of scholarly research and passionate, living, imaginative, joyous musicianship. You read the sleeve-notes which invariably and vividly paint a picture of the historical, social and geographical background to the musical 'main event' but every time the power of that music and its execution far outstrips expectation - scholarship falls away and you are swept up by the here and now, or perhaps that should be the hear and now.
If you think that McCreesh's musical imagination only revolves around re-creating great musical occasions you'd be wrong. Alongside those inspiring 'events' is a constant stream of recordings that take a new look at works that have long been staples of our musical diet, Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion, Mozart's C minor Mass… Each is rediscovered for us in a way that justifies revisiting them: in the hands of the Gabrielis the music sounds new - often provocatively new - and that is surely what the world of 'classical' music, with its constant circling of the masterpieces, is all about. Take Bach's St Matthew Passion, a work of such towering genius that it never fails to move whether in the hands of a group of enthusiastic amateurs or unfolded by musicians of international status. What McCreesh does in his recording is inspired by the one-to-a-part approach pioneered by Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott, but McCreesh uses his 'consort' of just eight singers to singularly expressive ends. Again scholarship is a way of opening up the path that practical musicianship can follow. The intimacy of the chorales is luminous, the crowd scenes - as the authorities seek to pass responsibility for Christ's sentence to the mob - frightening in their intensity as if we, the listeners, are being involuntarily swept along by the collective baying for blood. Then, as the soloists step out of the crowd they offer characterisations that feel profoundly altered and informed by the narrative. It's a powerful new take on a great classic and, reassuringly, rewards and unsettles in equal measure: as a telling of the Passion story surely should.
One of the other richly rewarding strands in the Gabrieli discography is the series of Handel oratorios, Saul, Theodora, Solomon and Messiah. These are magnificent works and, Messiah apart, are among the most treasurable pieces to have re-emerged into the light in past two decades thanks to the period-instrument movement. McCreesh has cast each to play to its strengths: Susan Bickley's Irene in Theodora, or Andreas Scholl and Susan Gritton as Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, or indeed Scholl again as David in Saul. Here is Handel interpretation of a supremely accomplished kind. And again, there is that sense of re-connecting with the sense of novelty, the 'first-time' encounter, that makes these performances so gripping. Rarely have old chestnuts like the 'Arrival of the Queen of Sheba' from Solomon or the 'Dead March' from Saul sounded so thrillingly original but also more powerful than in their correct context.
And then there are the two discs of music by Purcell - Harmonia sacra and the 1692 Ode for St Cecilia's Day, Hail, bright Cecilia! - works of such exquisite luminosity that benefit enormously from the Gabrielis' characteristic lightness of touch and fleetness of foot. Here is music to make an Englishman proud, and one senses, listening to these two supremely successful discs, that their performers love it too. The Ode, after all, portrays what musicians of the Gabrielis' calibre and 25-year experience clearly understand: music's power to heal and restore order. Or, as the text has it, to create 'one perfect harmony'.
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