JANEQUIN: Selected chansons.
Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal/Gilbert
Patenaude
Analekta FL 2 3184 (F) (DDD) TT: 46:17
Renaissance secular vocal music shows, I think, more variety than its sacred, liturgical counterpart. One encounters differences, not just among composers, but among nations. The madrigal, for example, essentially belongs to Italy. The English adapted the form to their own purposes during the Tudor fad for all things Italian. Spain and Germany tended to write pieces based on their own folk music - much simpler and more straightforward in concept than the madrigal. Individual composers like the German Heinrich Schuetz and the Flemish Adrian Willaert actually studied in Italy and found the madrigal then. France, as usual, went its own way. Its chief vocal form, the chanson, seems, generally speaking, less contrapuntal and less self-consciously outré harmonically than the madrigal and more concerned with the natural stress of text.
We know very little about Janequin's life, other than that he lived a long one and moved around a lot from job to job. He also brought a lawsuit against his brother over the family inheritance. The most popular chanson composer of his time, He lived to see three volumes of his work published. Unfortunately, the publisher seems to have made most of the money, just like today. Indeed, Janequin's music achieved such success, that an even less scrupulous publisher got up a volume of works by various hands and simply attributed all the items therein to Janequin.
Most know Janequin for his programmatic pieces: works describing a battle, birds, street cries, hunts, and so on. This sort of depiction was nothing new. Josquin, for example, evoked the chirping of crickets in his little frottole "El Grillo." Janequin, however, really went at it, creating a genre whose point was to exhaust as many of the possibilities of imitation as possible, as well as to provide a narrative that moved the piece along. For this reason, critics have labeled him a musical Realist. However, "realism" almost always brings up problems. What you find realistic, I might not. Janequin's birds, for example, don't sound very much like birds to me. Indeed, most musical birds, before Beethoven and Messiaën, come over as far too stylized to earn points for realism. It turns out that, for me at least, the descriptive pieces show the lesser side of this composer's art. There's a lot more to Janequin than cannons, fanfares, view-halloos, and chattering birds. Like so many French composers up through Boulez, he strives for elegance and a palpable sensuousness in the music. In many of his chansons, one finds a characteristic restraint, a concern for the right note at the right time, rather than a lot of notes. I can't imagine Janequin indulging in either the note-y exuberance of Monteverdi or the twisted gloom of Gesualdo. The delightful "Ce moys de may" ("this month of May"), for example, evokes the pastoral simplicity of folk music, while "Nature orant la dame" ("Nature has decorated the woman") sings an almost-straightforward, noble love song.
Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, a Montreal choir of teens and boys of about 75 strong, don't really suit much of this music - just too many of them. They're fine in the big descriptive pieces, with an exuberant "Le chant des oyseaulx" (an especially thrilling return among the birdsong of the beginning idea). The attack is sharp enough, necessary for all those folks to make their individual lines heard, but it's also crudely heavy. Consequently, they miss the spare elegance of the more reflective pieces and tend to plod through the pastoral stuff. As I say, I don't believe this repertoire belongs to groups with more than three to a part, and the quieter music sounds at its intimate best with one to a part, especially in something like "Doulens regretz, ennuys, souspirs" ("sweet regrets, doubts, sighs, and tears"), a very French love lament. The music is slow and reflective, but it does have a pulse. The choir just doesn't go anywhere. The choral sound is nice enough - indeed, the teens sound very adult - but the ends of pieces often dissolve into tatters, as if the conductor, Gilbert Patenaude, doesn't know quite how to release the music. On the other hand, my favorite track and my favorite of Janequin's descriptive pieces, "Les cris de Paris" ("the cries of Paris"), can take, and indeed benefits from, the choir's rough treatment. The lines are all clear and crisp, and the group's characteristic choppiness actually adds even more descriptive power to the portrayal of a rough-and-tumble marketplace. On the other hand, it also just ends, as if one walked through a doorway to a sheer drop or a hoo-hah. This interpretive habit - and one must blame the director - vitiates all the fine work that went before. This piece (for that matter, the others as well) needs a sense that it's capped by its ending, not cut short.
The sound is a bit too reverberant, but not enough to obscure the counterpoint.
S.G.S. (February 2005)