# Interesting excerpts from reviews



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Does anyone collect reviews of recordings? I think it's always interesting to see what smart and experienced people like magazine reviewers say about different recordings; so let's post some excerpts that seem interesting or valid from such reviews. I'll start with some Renaissance music related stuff.

"O gemma lux" by Huelgas Ensemble
from Gramophone


> So this is an important and ground-breaking account of one of medieval music's most exciting repertories. And it seems curmudgeonly for me to say that I am lukewarm about it, but there it is. There are essentially two problems here. First, van Nevel shows little awareness of the varying textures that seem fundamental to Dufay's genius; the instrumentation he uses for the lower voices repeatedly muddies those textures


I agree with this, and find the great reputation of this album unfortunate, because it pretty much guarantees that no one will attempt to do another album of these motets any time soon. There are though some nice recordings of some of the motets scattered across albums by different ensembles.

Nicolas Gombert 1
Gramophone


> Pulchra es is the third of Gombert's 10 surviving Masses to be recorded for CD, and it does no more than its two predecessors to dissuade me that his peculiar genius was most intensely fired by expressively specific motet texts.


I wonder whether he's onto something here. I'm inclined to agree, because presumably the masses that have been recorded are among the best masses that Gombert composed, and they're mostly not that interesting to me, but then again my favorite mass of his - and it's actually pretty good - is the one on "Nicolas Gombert 2", which this reviewer hadn't heard when he wrote this review (and apparently this second volume wasn't reviewed by Gramophone, or anyone for that matter).

Dufay: Missa Ecce ancilla Domini (Ensemble Gilles Binchois)
Gramophone


> The one major concern is with the overly slow tempos chosen for the Mass Ordinary. The singers themselves are at times audibly strained


As with the first excerpt, I'm choosing this because I think it's such an apt thing to say about that recording. I mean, there must be people around who enjoy those slow tempos, but come on, it took over twenty years to get a more authentic rendering (the one by Cut Circle).


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