Performer: The Hilliard Ensemble
Composer: Johannes Ockeghem
Audio CD
Number of Discs: 1
Format: APE (image+cue)
Label: EMI
Size: 251 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Kyrie eleison I
02. Christe eleison
03. Kyrie eleison II
04. Gloria
05. Credo
06. Sanctus
07. Pleni sunt coeli
08. Osanna
09. Benedictus
10. Agnus Dei I
11. Agnus Dei II/III
12. Alma redemptoris mater (a-h)
13. Salveregina (а, с, d, g)
14. Intemerata Dei mater (a, c, d, g, h)
15. Ave Maria (a, c, d, g)
16. Salve regina (a-h)
In April 1988, approximately four years after their successful recording of Johannes Ockeghem’s Requiem and Missa Mi-mi, the Hilliards returned to this composer, this time to record his famous Missa Prolationum and the handful of his surviving motets (all other motets accredited earlier to Ockeghem have been, it seems, proved not to be by him; even the first “Salve Regina” on this CD is probably not by Ockeghem but by a certain “Basiron”). The Missa Prolationum, says the booklet text, “ranks alongside Bach’s ‘Art of Fugue’ as the apotheosis of contrapuntal achievement. Its movements comprise a series of canons in which pairs of voices sing the same music but in different metres and separated by different melodic intervals for each movement or section”.The whole certainly makes fascinating listening, especially when performed and recorded as well as here: the interweaving voices of the eight Hilliard singers (two countertenors, three tenors, one baritone and two basses) are not only perfect in themselves (assuming that David James’s rather reedy-sounding countertenor is to your taste), but are also captured on disc in a way that makes listening a joyous task – the quality of the recording here (at Boxgrove Priory in England) is considerably improved over against the Requiem recording from 1984. Paul Hillier and his troupe take their time over every detail, creating the mystic effect for which they are, in the meantime, famous