Vol 1 Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks: Three Marian Antiphons

Alex Ross wrote at length about this CD in The New Yorker in January 2011. Here are excerpts from his piece: 'Fortunately, fresh ideas about Renaissance performance are proliferating... Among recent CDs in the polyphonic field, a recording by the Boston ensemble Blue Heron stands out, and not only because of the group's pleasingly quirky name. The director of Blue Heron is Scott Metcalfe... His aim is to bring expressive intensity, even a hint of Baroque flair, to the earlier repertory... The new Blue Heron disk... gathers five-part religious pieces by English composers of the early Tudor period: Robert Jones, John Mason, and, most significant, Hugh Aston... Only ten pieces by Aston survive, but they reveal a composer with a knack for generating brilliant climaxes from simple material... Of course, my sense of Aston's voice owes much to Blue Heron's imaginative realization of his scores. Through an array of interpretive choices-fine gradations of dynamics; pungent diction; telling contrasts of ethereal and earthly timbres; tempos that are more lusty than languid; a way of propelling a phrase toward a goal-the music takes on narrative momentum, it's moods dovetailing with the theme of the text. Listen to the brazen, almost raucous tone of the sopranos as they arrive, in "Ave Maria dive matris Anne," at the self-reflexive phrase "psallentes et omnes hoc Ave Maria"-"and all singing this Hail Mary." Or to the joyous thrust of the basses in the Amen coda of Aston's "Gaude virgo mater Christi," as they repeat a phrase in which one interval keeps widening, from a third to a fourth and, finally, to a fifth... The seemingly serene music of Renaissance church ritual did not stem from yoga-like spells of meditation. Instead, as Andrew Kirkwood observes, it communicated a desperate plea for mercy-in particular, "the desire to shorten the time in purgatory that, short of sainthood and immediate passage to paradise, would follow earthly life."... It is good to feel a hint of turbulence, of mortal fear, in performances such as Blue Heron's...; with that quiver of passion, the music inspires even greater awe.' The disc was released as the first in a series of recordings of music from the Peterhouse partbooks, the largest and most important source of English music surviving from the period just before the Reformation. The music is astonishingly beautiful and it's story is fascinating. We are able to sing these pieces in modern times only thanks to the work of a remarkable scholar and composer, Nick Sandon. The recording presents superlative music by three composers-Hugh Aston, Robert Jones, and John Mason-who were active in England in the 1510s through the 1540s. Today they are virtually unknown to performers and scholars alike owing to a historical tragedy, the destruction of most manuscripts of English sacred music during the religious upheavals of the 16th century.