Contrapunctus, Owen Rees - In the Midst of Life: Music from the Baldwin Partbooks I (2015)

The Baldwin Partbooks contain some 170 works dating from the middle years of the 16th century. They were copied out around approximately 1580 by the composer John Baldwin while he was at St George’s Chapel in Windsor. That was lucky because a significant amount of the music survives from nowhere else, and much of it is absolutely first-rate.

Contrapunctus really knows what to do with these pieces and from the very first item – Byrd’s Circumdederunt – the tuning is superb and the ensemble rock solid. Moreover, Owen Rees’s interpretations are revelatory and even visionary. Witness the subtle dynamic shading he applies to William Mundy’s Sive vigilem and the very finely judged pacing of the drive towards the climax in Theodoricus Gerarde’s magnificent setting of the same text. Because these performances are so accomplished we are not distracted from the music by blemishes of execution, and so are able to relish the development of compositional skill, from John Taverner’s Quemadmodum of c1525 with its already fully-fledged ethereal polyphonic style, to the unsurpassable marriage of harmonic suspension and melodic expansion in Byrd’s Audivi vocem from the 1580s. Some of these works are heard here for the first time because their lost tenor parts have now been reconstructed – another reason to be grateful. The recording is clean and warm, though very slightly distant. The next volume is keenly awaited.

Review by Anthony Pryer, BBC Music Magazine

The Baldwin Partbooks, today in the collection of Christ Church at Oxford University, are a set of compositions copied by composer and musician John Baldwin in the last quarter of the 16th century. The composer represented here is William Byrd, and from there the partbooks reach back to the more monumental, contrapuntally irregular style of John Sheppard and his contemporaries. Many of the pieces they contain are not preserved in any other source, and this release and others in a new series by the nine- (or ten-) voice English choir Contrapunctus seems likely to increase the size of the repertory of English Renaissance music that's commonly heard. Whatever future discs may bring, this fine release makes a good starting point. Its theme is death, and the album takes its title from the giant Sheppard motet Media vita (track 9), whose text has been translated many times ("In the midst of life we are in death"). The Sheppard piece, building a massive 23-minute structure out of a few lines of text, represents the essence of the middle English Renaissance style, which was all about carving out huge musical spaces, and the work here takes on considerable power. The works from the middle 16th century, with their widely spaced voices coming together in sharp harmonic clashes, make a vivid contrast with the pieces by Byrd and the other Elizabethans on the program, and Contrapunctus and director Owen Rees make the most of this contrast. Put it all together with perfectly idiomatic sound from the Church of St. Michael and All Saints in Oxford and informative, enthusiastic notes by Rees, and this is a superior release that gets to the heart of a repertory that often gives listeners problems.

Review by James Manheim, Allmusic.com

Exact Audio Copy V1.1 from 23. June 2015

EAC extraction logfile from 19. August 2015, 21:44

Contrapunctus, Owen Rees / Music from the Baldwin Partbooks I

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==== Log checksum 319D35AB863CAADF7601774881128EB57F330F5DDC3DB04A45DC2AAA7095F718 ====

foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2016-06-05 12:45:59

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Contrapunctus, Owen Rees / Music from the Baldwin Partbooks I
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DR Peak RMS Duration Track
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DR14 -1.72 dB -21.18 dB 5:04 01-William Byrd: Circumdederunt me dolores mortis
DR14 -0.16 dB -19.04 dB 7:29 02-Robert Parsons: Libera me Domine
DR15 -1.11 dB -22.03 dB 4:15 03-William Byrd: Audivi vocem de caelo
DR13 -1.45 dB -20.58 dB 3:31 04-William Mundy: Sive vigilem
DR16 -0.13 dB -23.03 dB 6:08 05-Robert Parsons: Peccantem me quotidie
DR13 -5.82 dB -22.98 dB 6:30 06-John Taverner: Quemadmodum
DR14 -1.31 dB -21.14 dB 3:14 07-Thomas Tallis: Nunc dimittis
DR14 -0.13 dB -19.94 dB 6:14 08-Dericke Gerarde: Sive vigilem
DR12 -0.45 dB -18.51 dB 2:44 09-Robert Parsons: Credo quod redemptor meus vivit
DR15 -0.09 dB -20.73 dB 23:09 10-John Sheppard: Media vita
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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