Cleve • Vaet

Cleve: Missa Rex Babylonis and other works; Vaet: Rex Babylonis Cinquecento

Hyperion CDA68241 69:39 mins

For over ten years the group Cinquecento has specialised (as its name suggests) in music from the 1500s. More specifically they have done much to resurrect composers who worked at the Habsburg

Court in Vienna – Guyot, Monte, Schoendorff and now Johannes de Cleve (d1582). These singers are always nicely in tune and effectively blended, especially in the slower movements of the Mass where they strongly project the chordal colouring in the ‘Qui tollis’ and perfectly intensify the false relations in the first Agnus.

Cleve, though, tends to keep all voices singing all the way through, so there is little respite from the unyielding texture. Vocal blending tends to turn into a solid wall – an amorphous effect exacerbated by the lack of clear consonants in the projection of the texts (Carole qui veniens) and some missed opportunities to highlight particular voice parts (for example the tenor part in Es wel uns Gott which caries the chorale tune). Also in that work and elsewhere (Laudate Dominum), although each vocal line is presented musically, the singers seem rarely to work together to decide on a collective shape for the whole piece. Cleve’s later works (Carole cui nomen) are more interesting, as is Vaet’s motet Rex Babylonis – a pity this was not placed before Cleve’s Mass which is based on it. Anthony Pryer

PERFORMANCE ★★★

RECORDING ★★★★

CPE Bach: Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Stande, Wq. deest; Symphony In F, Wq. Deest;

JCF Bach: Pygmalion, Wf XVIII:5;

JS Bach: Ich habe genug, BWV82 (1747 version); WF Bach: Symphony in B flat, F71

Benjamin Appl (baritone); Berlin Baroque Soloists/reinhard Goebel Hänssler HC 19081 78:51 mins

Baritone Benjamin Appl returns to Bach for his latest recording, this time widening the remit to encompass the diverse musicality of the sons. The clean lines of the father are refracted in a musical hall of mirrors, from the myriad emotions of Johann Christoph Friedrich’s Pygmalion to the exaggerated dissonance of Wilhelm Friedemann’s Symphonie.

Appl, warm, intimate, colouring his voice just so, is at his superbly expressive best in the quasi-operatic drama of Pygmalion, with its wide emotional range, or the thrust of Carl Philipp Emanuel’s cantata

‘Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Stande’, which opens the recording. Invigorating and punchy, it is sung and played with great drive by Appl and the Berlin Baroque Soloists under the baton of Reinhard Goebel.

In between, there is buoyant, sculpted propulsion in the Symphony in F major for strings and basso continuo, recently attributed to CPE Bach – and you can hear it in the bones of the piece. It is one of two works given a world premiere recording here, the other being younger brother Wilhelm’s Symphony in B flat major, which is both robust and refined, without the gutsy sound of CPE, but pocked with interesting tonalities.

Appl returns to JS Bach for the finale, his sombre cantata Ich habe genug richly toned, although here,

as elsewhere, Appl occasionally sounds a little overwhelmed by the orchestra and unsupported, vocally, which is the caveat to the whole. Indeed there’s something a little off about the balance and sound elsewhere on this recording, which does occasionally detract from this subtle juxtaposition of musical fashions evolving before our ears. Sarah Urwin Jones

PERFORMANCE ★★★

RECORDING ★★★