By A
This recording is in print. Go to Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, or Amazon France; the links are at the bottom of this page. At Amazon UK search for “Binchois – Songs,” at the two other sites search for “Mon Souverain Desir.” …. All have many song samples.
This CD is priceless, one of the great performances by one of the best early music vocal groups. It is recommended by Gramophone in its 2001 Good CD Guide and received the highest marks from Goldberg, Diapason, Monde de la Musique, and Repertoire magazines, as well as a Cannes Classical Award in 1999.A life’s worth of beauty and grace is in this CD.
At first the music and the performance may seem distant and cold. But, like a spring thaw, time spent listening to this album will slowly reveal a new world, profound and vivid. Ensemble Gilles Binchois employ none of the tastelessly showy gestures some other groups have satisfied themselves with, here this group has moved beyond mere performance. And once this music is allowed its own voice, itself lacking a meretricious note, it is unforgettable.
The list of 15th Century chanson composers is long and distinguished, and includes Dufay (Binchois’ contemporary), Ockeghem (possibly the student of Binchois), and Busnois. Binchois is at the head of this list, the ideal mirror of a perfected courtly culture. How right that Dominique Vellard should name his ensemble after Binchois! This perfect match has given these songs the wings to escape their time and the composer’s mortality.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Love-sick Lyrics, Hauntingly Beautiful Recording
By Leslie Richford
Gilles de Bins, known as Binchois (c. 1400 – 1460): Mon souverain désir. 17 Chansons. Performed by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois (Anne-Marie Lablaude, soprano; Lena-Susanne Norin, mezzo-soprano; Akira Tachikawa, countertenor; Dominique Vellard, tenor and lute; Emmanuel Bonnardot, baritone and fiddle; Pierre Hamon, recorder, flute and drums; Randall Cook, fiddle and rebec; Jan Walters, harp; Miriam Andersen, harp). Recorded at Grancey-le-Chateau, France, in October 1996 and May 1997. Originally released in 1997 as Virgin Veritas 7243 5 45285 2 1. Total time: 60’27″.
At the time of writing, this CD appears to have been withdrawn from the EMI catalogue, but it has been re-issued in Europe together with Songs by Jehan Lescurel on Virgin’s Veritas x 2 budget label, unfortunately without the learned introductory notes and the texts of the songs. My recommendation would be to try and get hold of a second-hand copy of the original production with the booklet, this being to my mind much more satisfying.
The first half of the fifteenth century was dominated by composers from the Low Countries, and two names in particular achieved special fame: Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois. But while the more extroverted Dufay has been well-served by the recording industry, it was many years before a disc devoted to Binchois appeared – although, as David Fallows points out in his notes, it seems that Binchois was at least as popular in his day, his only disadvantages being the fact that he never went to Italy, where most manuscripts have survived, and that his musical production is more introverted. His works can be fairly neatly divided into sacred and secular, and this CD by the brilliant French Ensemble Gilles Binchois (not to be confused with the British Binchois Consort led by Andrew Kirkman) brings together, for the first time as far as I can make out, a collection of 17 of Binchois’s secular songs, all of which can be characterized as sad and love-sick (although the last of the 17, “Filles a marier”, has been correctly described as “rumbustious”, a colloquial expression meaning “boisterous” or “uproarious”). The texts are by various authors, some of whom are known, others are anonymous – possibly Binchois wrote some of them himself. All these songs are in three parts, the highest voice carrying the melody, the other two balancing it contrapuntally or being used to modulate the rhythm. Purists will probably expect vocal performances without instruments (such as on some of the Hyperion CDs by Christopher Page’s Gothic Voices), but Dominique Vellard has opted not only for instrumental accompaniments for most of the songs, but even has tracks 3, 7, 11 and 13 played on instruments only, whereas track 15 is divided into two sections, the first vocal, the second instrumental. The internet offers a number of learned essays discussing the pros and cons of this decision, and if you are interested, I suggest using a search engine for study.
But that is just the mechanics. The soul of this CD is the absolutely stunningly beautiful performance by an ensemble that really deserves the name. The voices here are incredibly fitting: there is no “showiness” whatsoever, just a peaceful and graceful flowing, allowing the texts and the mellifluous melodies to speak to the heart. Anne-Marie Lablaude has a delightful vibrato-less soprano, but I also enjoyed the androgynous sweetness of Lena-Susanne Norin’s dark mezzo and of Akira Tachikawa’s faultless countertenor, which could not be further from the falsetto “crowing” to be heard on some 1980s recordings. Dominique Vellard and Emmanuel Bonnardot have worked together on numberless projects over many years, and their singing and playing harmonises perfectly. Of the instrumentalists, it is Pierre Hamon with his superb recorder and flute who sticks out, and he has a number of opportunities to shine here, including a couple of numbers (“Je me recommande”) where he can thrash his “tambour” to his heart’s desire.
The booklet is superb, but I made out a couple of errors in the listings. “Adieu mes tres belles” (track 7) is performed by Pierre Hamon solo and not vocally, as the track-listing claims.
As with all the Pere Casulleras recordings that I know about, the engineering and sound is absolutely beyond reproach, making this a recording to savour. And, indeed, the reason I bought it was that it was accorded “Recommendation of the Month” status in the German-language “Klassik heute” magazine (July, 1998). I can only underline the enthusiastic encomiums of the critic there – and lament the policy of EMI/Virgin of allowing such great recordings to go out of print within a few years.
Note: In track 4 “En regardant”, Dominique Vellard is accompanied by Miriam Andersén on the harp. When I first heard this, I thought there must be another instrument (dulcian?) playing along, too. But Ms. Andersén has informed me that she was using a special technique to produce this “brassy” sound, something that I did not, frankly, know was possible. But listening again on high-end earspeakers, it was obvious that she was right. I stand corrected.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
It’s Been Re-Released …
By Giordano Bruno
… by Virgin Veritas in a 2 CD set, the other CD being a re-release of muisc by Jehan de Lescurel. Both CDs were recorded in the late 1990s. The two-fer is cheaper and perhaps a bit cleaner in sound quality. I may get around to reviewing it more fully some day soon, but meanwhile I fear that this is the most satisfactory performance of the chansons of Gilles Binchois on the market. If you sense that I think a better performance is needed, you understand me fairly easily.
Meanwhile, for all “Early Music” lovers, I’ll have to use this mini-review as a pretext to recommend the recordings of the Austrian vocal ensemble “The Sound and The Fury” on the ORF label. They have recorded masses and motets by Ockeghem, Obrecht, Gombert, and – newest in my collection – Firminus Caron. If there were a Wimbleton tournament of vocal ensembles, right now I’d give then “first seed.” I need to smuggle their name into this review because none of their CDs are available here on amazon.com. They are available on amazon.uk, amazon.de, and amazon.fr .
The Caron CD includes two astonishing masses — Missa accueilly m’a la belle & Missa L’homme armé — though Caron, like Binchois, was better known as a composer of French chansons. The L’homme armé mass is a personal benchmark; I have now heard all the surviving masses composed on material from the chanson L’homme armé. It might be hyperbole to declare that I’ve saved the best for last, but I can honestly say that Caron’s L’homme armé is as glorious as any, more affectively unified than most, more boldly colorful. And this performance is exactly what might make a person think that Firminus Caron belongs in the pantheon of polyphony alongside Dufay and Josquin.
Further thoughts on the Caron performance: Sound/Fury chooses to sing the L’homme armé mass with forcefully different timbres than they relied on for their Obrecht and Gombert performances. They deliberately emphasize the ‘secular’ and brusque quality inherent in the words and melody of the L’homme armé chanson. I suppose it’s a modern performance tradition, with very flimsy historical evidence to support it, to sing the secular Flemish and French chansons with rather brash nasal timbres, krummhorn-like and in fact suggestive of folk-music styles from around the planet. It certainly “works” for the tavern songs … makes them more appealing and tangy … and to my ears it also works for Caron’s L’homme armé mass. The other mass, a very melismatic aerial piece of polyphony, is sung in a more dignified churchly manner.
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