Blue Heron releases Volume 4 in its Peterhouse Partbooks Series

Blue Heron / Scott Metcalfe, director

Street Date: August 14, 2015 Total Time: 65:51

Blue Heron announces the release of the fourth installment in its pathbreaking 5-CD series of music from the Peterhouse partbooks. Blue Heron Copied circa 1541 for Canterbury Cathedral, the partbooks are the largest and most important source of English sacred music surviving from the period before the death of Henry VIII and the onset of the English Reformation (1547). This new recording, Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 4, features the enchantingly mellifluous Missa Spes nostra by a superb and virtually anonymous composer, Robert Jones, whose only other work which survives in restorable condition (a Magnificat) appears on Vol. 1 of the series. This is the world premiere recording of the Mass by Jones and the Stabat mater by Robert Hunt. All the works have been restored by the English musicologist Nick Sandon. Previously released CDs in the series are Vol. 1, Hugh Aston: Three Marion Antiphons (2010); Vol. 2, Nicholas Ludford: Missa Regnum mundi (2012); and Vol. 3, Nicholas Ludford: Missa Inclina cor meum (2013).

 

The new disc can be ordered (and pre-ordered) through Amazon and iTunes. Direct links to purchase can be found here. More reviews can be found here. 

 

 

Our understanding of English music from the early sixteenth century is grievously hindered by a historical tragedy, the loss of most manuscripts of English sacred music during the religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Reformation regarded the florid music of late medieval Catholicism with disdain, if not outright hostility, and much was lost or deliberately destroyed by zealots. Fewer than ten significant sources survive from the years 1480-1547, a smaller number of volumes than one might have found at the time in just one well-stocked chapel’s music library. The Peterhouse partbooks are the largest extant source and contain nearly 50 pieces not found complete anywhere else. Despite the enormous importance of this source to music history and the extremely high quality of much of the music contained in it, it has received short shrift from performers and musicologists alike owing to the fact that one of the five partbooks, along with a portion of another, has been missing for centuries. This has prevented singers from performing the fifty pieces in the partbooks that survive complete in no other source—until recently, that is. Blue Heron’s performances of the incomplete Peterhouse music rely on brilliant reconstructions by the English musicologist Nick Sandon, who has devoted his career to restoring this repertoire to its rightfully prominent place.

 

Reviews of Volume 1 included an extended piece by Alex Ross in The New Yorker (January 10, 2011), in which Ross commended Blue Heron for its “expressive intensity…even a hint of Baroque flair…fine gradations of dynamics; pungent diction; telling contrasts of ethereal and earthly timbres…” About Volume 2, Barry Brenesal wrote in Fanfare (Sept./Oct. 2012) “This album and its predecessor…are the beginning of an exciting series, more than hinting at the wealth of great sacred music written by English composers between roughly 1500 and 1540…top marks in all respects: engineering, liner notes—by the group’s director, Scott Metcalfe—and, of course, the performances themselves.” Matthew Guerrieri called Volume 3 “exemplary” in The Boston Globe, and continued: “The performances are suffused with elegance and polish, but, as with other releases in the series, what is equally compelling is the play of time: bygone, deliberately antiquarian relics reintroduced into the modern world as pristine artifacts; intense, expressively heightened dramas that unfold in a kind of purified, meditative slow motion.”

 

The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Scott Metcalfe on the music recorded and the performance of 16th-century vocal music. A detailed account by Nick Sandon of the partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music may be found in the notes to Volume 1. All CD notes may be read online or downloaded at Blue Heron’s website (www.blueheronchoir.org), where you will also find links to more information on the project, including recorded interviews with Sandon and Metcalfe.