CD Review | Ensemble ArtChoral, Art Choral, Vol. 2 : Baroque I

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Art Choral, Vol. 2 : Baroque I

Ensemble ArtChoral: sopranos Magali Simard-Galdès, Denise Torre Ormeño and Ellen Torrie; altos William Duffy, Rosalie Lane-Lépine and Meagan Zantingh; tenors Jean-Sébastien Allaire, Haitham Haidar and Adam Will Begley; basses Alasdair Campbell, Clayton Kennedy and William Krausha; Matthias Maute, conductor

Atma Classique, 2024

Art Choral, Vol. 2 : Baroque I is Ensemble ArtChoral’s second release in a series of 15 albums surveying the history of choral music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. In this volume, listeners are presented with a variety of sacred and secular pieces written by composers from all over Europe. As the booklet explains, the early Baroque period is defined by an “ever-increasing suppleness and expressiveness.” Pieces by Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Fernandes, Hassler, Shutz and Purcell are emblematic of the time period, in which there was an increasing emphasis on rendering the sense of the text by way of melodic and harmonic gesture.

Ensemble ArtChoral’s performance is confident yet never heavy-handed. This is clearly a group that is passionate about early music; the voices have a pure timbre, untouched by the vibrato that would, over the centuries, come to be standard in vocal performance. Matthias Maute has a masterly command of this ensemble and there is the sense that the conductor and musicians are unified in the pursuit of a celestial sound-world.

Like the voices, the acoustic of this album also has an empyrean quality; this music sounds expansive and highly resonant, reflecting the fact it was recorded in a church. The grandeur of the recording location is very well transmitted through the recorded sound, and the amplified church acoustic gives one the sense that there are more singers than were actually present.

I was also struck by the other-worldly quality of the intonation of these performances and would have liked to know whether the group uses just intonation. An explanation in the accompanying booklet about tuning of the time period as well as other performance practices would have been most welcome. Considering the album’s musicological bent, it would also have been beneficial to have lyrics and translations printed in the booklet. This would help listeners, for example, to follow the ways dissonances and other striking musical passages evoke the meaning of the text.