This is a reissue of a performance from 1985 -- a time when most choirs that performed Renaissance masses started with the Kyrie and ran straight through until they finished up with Agnus Dei III and its prayer for peace. This wasn't how the music for the mass was (or is) used, but the performance mode fit the way this music, distant from us in time and place, was initially taught and understood -- it sought to elucidate the music's basic structure and characteristics. And in this it succeeds. On the program are two of the more extreme masses of the High Renaissance: the murky Requiem of Pierre de la Rue and the intellectually acrobatic Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae of Josquin, along with the famous Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem. The performers second-guess the notation of la Rue's requiem mass and transpose it upwards -- a practice that still has its defenders, but that a greater understanding of the role tessitura plays in Renaissance music has made problematical. In any event, the mass is a good deal less distinctive performed this way. The Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae, written as advertised for Hercules (or Ercole), Duke of Ferrara, must have been intended to dazzle the good duke with brilliance. It not only embeds the vowels of the whole name in a theme derived from the resultant solmization syllables but also uses that theme as, to quote the helpful booklet by John Milsom, a "scaffold around which a large and elaborate polyphonic mass could be constructed." Job One here is to make that melody crystal clear, and the mixed-gender New London Chamber Choir does just that, with direct singing that makes up for occasional pitch inaccuracies with sharp delineation of Josquin's lines. This group is better known for performances of contemporary music than for Renaissance works, but it offers a good example of why crossovers between those two specialties are often successful: the group respects the difficulties of communicating complex music and realizes that the straightforward approach is often best. Recommended especially for collections missing the Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae, a monument among the works showing Josquin's brainy side, the counterparts in his oeuvre to Bach's fugal masterpieces. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide
