# Im having a hard time getting into Gombert's magnificats, even if i like his music



## deprofundis (Apr 25, 2014)

I warned you all, i only have heard the Tallis Scholars version primo
Im not familiar whit magnificats but find Pierre de la Rue magnificats on naxos awesome deuxio

I love what Nicolas Gombert put out motets, chanson genra, but i have a hard time getting into is magnificats, see gombert music is wild,dissonant , not is Magnificats 1-8 who are conventional but it's church music so i guess it's normal.

Or...

There a better version of is entire magnificats i dont know or can't have too pricy, some crap like this, and it's not Tallis Scholars best effort jeez i dont know 

Dont get me wrong i love most of Tallis Scholars release hail then worshiped them, i order a Jean Mouton lately by them so , im a fanboy but there double cd offering eluded me , for some reason not that it's bad but it could be not the utter best, this is what bothering me?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Part of the problem is that the way the Tallis Scholars sing there, each voice has a similar timbre, so the way the different musical lines intertwine isn't well underlined.

Another aspect, which I learned through hearing them live, is that a major part of Tallis Scholars current aesthetic at least is _accuracy_. The rhythms, the interactions, are very very sharp. That Gombert CD is old, not so brilliantly recorded, and hence, insofar as it existed then, accuracy isn't really audible.

There is another aspect. Maybe by the time Gombert wrote the magnificat cycle he was past his prime, it can't be for nothing that the magnificats are so little recorded and so little performed. He was, I think, pioneering a quasi-baroque style which is really hard to pull off because the polyphony returns to Ockeghem-like complexity, but the textures are quite uniform.

Having said that, I think the Magnificat that Henry's Eight recorded is worth trying to hear, as is Paul van Nevel's







.


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