Avid listeners to Renaissance music may know Brumel's glorious 12-voice Mass Et ecce terrae motus, recorded twice in recent years; and I hope that will draw them to take an interest in this anthology of some of his other sacred works. Brumel is another of those composers around 1500 whose achievement has been overshadowed by that of Josquin. Like several of them, he is a man with a distinctive voice and a wide range of musical ideas, often executed with immaculate skill. The more I hear of that generation the morel am convinced that it was a true golden age of polyphony with a range of composers who can fully match the High Renaissance painters and architects of those years. But such a view is hard to reach from the printed page alone: until more of this music is available in decent recordings its artistic richness will remain hidden. Listening to this issue was, for me, yet another experience of astonishment at the sheer quality of the music.

Brumel's Mass Berzereite savoyenne is a lucid and gripping work. I still do not understand how it was possible for a composer to have based a Mass on a piece like Josquin's shepherdess-seduction song; but Brumel certainly hides nothing. In the Kyrie the melody is clearly presented in the top line; later it is in the tenor, but always unmistakably audible, despite the range of crystalline motivic devices that surround it in the other voices. Each movement contains an apparently inexhaustible repertory of new ideas; and the final Agnus Dei has a series of almost unbelievable repetitions (in the old days one would suspect that the needle had got stuck in a groove), which bring this unusually witty work to a surprising close. As a piece of devotional music, it raises questions; but as pure music it is wonderfully satisfying.

The men of Chanticleer manage to keep exactly the right balance of serenity and lightness of touch in the Mass: they succeed marvellously (which is not the case in their rough opening performance of the Josquin chanson). Of the motets, the tiny Sicut lilium and the thick-textured Heth: Cogitavit Dominus sound particularly good. The disc has an authoritative note by Barton Hudson, editor of Brumel's complete works.

Hearing this record has opened my ears to a new dimension of Renaissance music. Perhaps it will do the same for you.

-- Gramophone [7/1994]