Obrecht: Missa Caput / Salve Regina

Description

Jacob Obrecht (1457/8 - 1505)Missa Caput Salve Regina a 4Salve Regina a 6 Among the extraordinarily gifted composers who changed themusical world in late fifteenth-century Europe, Obrecht will always be seen to have aspecial position He is distinguished from his contemporaries for the serenity of hismusical vision, his unmatched ear for sonority, and not least the astonishingly affectiverange of his writing which encompasses the playful, the jubilant, and the rapturous.Obrecht's music is more than a window into late-medieval society, it has the power tomove, inspire, and console us even today. Jacob Obrecht was born in Ghent (in what is now Belgium) in1457/8. His father, Willem Obrecht, was a city trumpeter with a fairly active professionallife, together with five colleagues he regularly travelled away from Ghent to work in theservice of powerful magnates in the orbit of the Burgundian court. Obrecht was tocommemorate his father's death in November 1488 with the motet Mille quingentis. His mother, Lijsbette Gheeraerts,was the daughter of a northern Flemish trader; she died in July 1460 when Jacob was onlytwo years old. Obrecht must have been extraordinarily precocious. He wasappointed to his first known musical post in the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom at the ageof 22. This was the position of choirmaster at the church of St Gertrude, which he heldfrom 1480-84 Around the same time the influentialJohannes Tinctoris, writing in Naples, singled him out as one of ten major composers 'whose music, distributed throughout the whole world, fillsGod's churches, the palaces of kings, and the houses of private individuals, with theutmost sweetness'. Indeed there are reports from as early as 1484 thatObrecht's Mass settings were circulating in Italy. Hardly three years later, in 1487, DukeErcole d'Este of Ferrara was reported to favour Obrecht's music over that of othercomposers, and he invited him to be his guest at the Ferrarese court for six months. Despite these and other signs of international recognition,Obrecht does not seem to have had a particularly prosperous career. Throughout the period1485-1503 he kept moving back and forth between musical positions at Antwerp, Bruges, andBergen op Zoom, cities in the south-western Low Countries comprising an area with a radiusof about forty miles. His typical musical duties normally included housing, nourishing,and educating between six and eight choirboys, and taking charge of the daily, weekly,yearly round of liturgical celebrations. Somehow, within this never-ending burden ofonerous responsibilities, Obrecht found it within himself to produce such music as we hearon this recording. Only towards the end of his life, in 1504, did internationalrecognition open the way to less burdensome and more lucrative musical positions. InSeptember of 1504 he accepted the prestigious post of maestrodi cappella at the court of Ferrara, only to lose it upon the death of hispatron, Duke Ercole, in the following January. After s