At 2:06 pm 28/11/98, Matthew Westphal wrote:

>A key point about that recording and Peres' achievement in it is that HE
>EXPLAINED WHAT HE WAS DOING AND WHY IN THE PROGRAM NOTES FOR THE DISC.  I
>don't know where (or even if) Peres publishes the results of his own
>research, but any such publications will not be accessible to the large
>majority of the audience for his concerts and recordings.  Program notes are
>an outlet where he can make his case for the approach he takes and why
>without worrying (at least in the immediate term) about arguing with other
>scholars who don't agree with his approach.  (I might add that program notes
>also give critics like me the opportunity to understand -- and to be
>receptive to -- his ideas before the deadline for submitting our reviews.)
>Yet Peres often fails to take advantage of this opportunity.
>
>To take the examples that have irked me most:
>
>1. I never saw any explanation that made sense of why he chose to use
>Corsican vocal timbre and embellishments in Machaut's Mass.
>
>2.  Ockeghem's Requiem.  He performed and recorded one of the best-known and
>most-recorded works of 15th-century using a vocal style that seems to
>disregard most commonly held assumptions/notions of what constitutes
>beautiful sound and musicality in this repertory.  That could be a very
>healthy thing, but the program notes with the CD devote not one word to the
>issue.
>


I will grant that Peres does not explain himself as much as he could in the
notes to every disc.  On the other hand, the notes to his discs have to be
read in sequence, because he rarely repeats himself in his notes and seems
to assume that everyone has followed his development and/or is familiar
with all work coming out of Royaumont. (The Sherman "Inside Early Music"
interview, however, is a good introduction and/or review of his progress.
Christopher Page also did an interesting interview with him a while ago for
"Spirit of the Age" on Radio 3).  It is also my impression that he is now
so thoroughly immersed in vocal styles and traditions outside the orbits of
Solesmes and the English cathedrals that he takes a lot for granted that is
still baffling to people unfamiliar with those traditions.

Lets take as an example the Machaut "Messe" recording.  As far as I can
tell, his choice of employing Corsican singers was based on his desire for
people used to singing in parts who do not employ the modern vocal styles
developed for singing polyphony in English cathedrals (i.e. blend at all
costs and rigid adherence to the written score, both of which fit in nicely
with what Taruskin has written about the way in which Early Music groups
reflect Stravinsky's musical aesthetics) or for opera houses (power is
everything, especially when singing over a huge orchestra in a 3,000-seat
concert hall).  If he wanted a different version of the same effect, he
probably could have done the recording with a group specialising in Russian
early and folk polyphony like Sirin.   Compared to the Machaut, the
Ockeghem recording is quite mainstream, so I'm not too sure why you find it
ugly or unmusical.   If I recall correctly, this was not the impression of
Fabrice Fitch in Early Music, who--despite somecomplaints about the odd
transpositions--was generally positive about the Peres' Requiem recording.

All of this is not to say Peres does not make the same sorts of leaps of
faith--i.e. does things he likes and/or that sound interesting without
subjecting them to a Mendel-style musicological litmus test--that every
everybody else does when performing medieval music.  He just makes them in
directions that are unexpected to people used to performances along the
Solesmes/English cathedral axis.  Although I can't pretend to speak for
Peres, I do know from Angelopoulos about how a couple of rather interesting
decisions were made:

1) In his interview with Sherman, Peres refers to the use of some unusual
ficta in the offertory "Ecce apertum" on his Ambrosian chant disc.  All
this came about in rehearsal when, after Angelopoulos started singing the
piece in a fairly normal G-mode, he noticed that some of the cadences and
melodic patterns were more or less the same as those found in the received
Byzantine tradition's G-mode (Mode IV Authentic (=Western 7) "Agia").
Although few if any sharps or flats are ever written for this mode, it
employs in performance the "attractions" ("elxeis") to G, B and C that
Peres describes in the interview.  Angelopoulos mentioned these melodic
similarities to Peres and demonstrated how the chant might be sung with all
the ficta.  Peres liked it and included it on the recording.  Obviously,
there are no theoretical sources which can prove that these sort of sharps
and flats were used, but it demonstrates one possible way in which a
Mediterranean style of singing can subtly shape a melody in a manner that
is almost inconceivable to someone bound to the literal and 'clean'
renderings of modern English choral singing. [Angelopoulos, by the way,
refers briefly to the melodic similarities mentioned above in an article
printed in ed. C. Troelsgård, Byzantine Chant: Tradition and Reform, Acts
of a Meeting held at the Danish Institute at Athens, Monographs of the
Danish Institute at Athens 2 (Aarhus: 1997)].

2) A similar situation arose when Peres was recording his CD of Beneventan
chant, which includes that tradition's surviving examples of Greek-Latin
bilingual singing.  When they came to the hymn "O quando in cruce/Ote to
stavro," Angelopoulos pointed out that the Greek hymn is sung today in a
soft chromatic tuning.  They experimented with this and it worked, but it
just seemed so odd within the entire context of the recording that they
decided to sing it diatonically.  [Scholars, incidentally, are divided over
whether or not such tunings were employed in medieval Byzantine chant.
George Amargiannakis wrote a doctoral thesis under Jorgen Raasted in
Copenhagen on this topic and there are articles on both sides.
Angelopoulos himself hasn't made up his mind and did a concert a couple
years ago at the Byzantine Studies Congress in Copenhagen in which he did
one piece twice: once diatonically and once chromatically to demonstrate
the difference.]


Alexander Lingas, Ph.D.
St. Peter's College
Oxford  OX1 2DL
United Kingdom
Office Tel: + 44 (0) 1865 278917
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 278855
Home Tel:  + 44 (0) 1865 370641




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