GABRIELI TARR HR BRASS - VENETIAN BRASS CD

SKU/Barcode: 845221050126

This release by the unspectacularly named (unless you're in Human Resources) HR Brass originally appeared in 1995. Booklet notes are in German, French, and thoroughly inadequate English. One learns from the last of these that the album was "perhaps the first attempt to rehearse this music with modern instruments while maintaining the performance practices of their time," the use of an "organ positive," a small positive organ, prominent among them. Inscrutable as parts of this may be, it does point to the unique niche the album continues to occupy, making the album's 2009 reissue a desirable development. The program represents a fairly deep single-disc sampling of the instrumental music associated with St. Mark's cathedral in Venice around and after the year 1600, played on modern brass instruments rather than the motley crew of devices that a historically authentic performance would use. This so-called "polychoral" music drew its structure from St. Mark's complex internal space, with groups of musicians situated in different parts of the building falling naturally into antiphonal structures. The big name in the repertory is Giovanni Gabrieli, whose Sonata pian e forte, the first piece of music in the Western tradition to include notated dynamics, opens the program. Groups of pieces drawn from Gabrieli's sets of Symphonie sacrae bookend the program. Unlike the many recordings that simply present Gabrieli's works in series, this one offers a large section of music by other composers associated with St. Mark's. These broaden the palette of the program as a whole, and hearing such examples as the almost minimal Canzona "La Bottaga" of Cesario Gussago (track 11) attunes the ear to the richness, brilliance, and fluent blend of contrapuntal and homophonic elements that earned Gabrieli his reputation as a master. The future development of instrumental music is hinted at by a single piece, Frescobaldi's Canzon ottava detta "L'ambitiosa" (track 13). The homogeneous modern brasses aren't as colorful as period instruments would be, but they enable the listener to follow the many ways the instrument groupings are handled in this music. The release remains a valuable introduction to the polychoral style.