Buxtehude in song
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/em/cay026
ISSN1741-7260
Autores ResumoAnother recording of Membra Jesu nostri! Dieterich Buxtehude: Membra Jesu nostri (Opus Arte oa cd9023 d, issued 2014, 62′) features The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, directed by Daniel Hyde, with soloists John Mark Ainsley, Robin Blaze and Giles Underwood, and viol consort Phantasm (together with an unnamed instrumental ensemble). Readers of Early Music will be able to look back at several previous reviews of Buxtehude’s most popular vocal piece, including my own review in 2009 (xxxvii/1, pp.132–5) which looked in particular at the question of the deployment of solo and choral voices, and which also considered earlier releases from Ton Koopman’s Opera Omnia series discussed below. This new recording is greatly to be welcomed into the fold, being unusual in that it emanates from an English choral foundation. Although the liner notes do not reveal the fact, the institutional nature of the recording is crucial to its existence. Scholarship and performance have the potential to live constructively side-by-side in university environments such as this; the three main soloists are all former choir members at Magdalen, either as boy or man, the leader of the viol consort Phantasm, Professor Laurence Dreyfus, is now Fellow Emeritus, and the writer of the sleeve notes, Dr Bettina Varwig, is a former Research Fellow at the college. However, whilst the institution is relevant in that the recording gives us a comparatively rare opportunity to hear the music sung throughout by boy trebles, what matters is that these boys under Daniel Hyde sing with great verve and expression, and convey the extensive Latin poetry of the cycle as if they are spending most of their time between practice and Evensong digesting Kennedy’s Revised Latin primer. In the seemingly breathless aria style, as encountered in much Roman music of the period, the temptation of having several boys sing the arias together must have been to stagger the breathing, but Hyde importantly still allows time between the phrases so the metre of poetry comes across effectively. In another recent recording using boys involving the Knabenchor Hannover (Harald Weiss: Requiem (Rondeau: rop7008/09, issued 2014, 89′), solo women sopranos are nevertheless used for the solo and ensemble verses, whereas all are taken in the Magdalen performance by the boys.
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