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BLUE HERON CHOIR
WHO WAS THAT MASKED COMPOSER?

The Blue Heron Renaissance Choir’s audiences have come to expect peak experiences almost as a matter of course. Two weeks ago Friday at the First Congregational Church in Cambridge, it was the Missa spes nostra of Robert Jones that was prompting the astonishment and delight, and with the usual questions in tow. Who was this composer? And is there more?

First of all, it has to be said — really, proclaiming from the rooftops wouldn’t be excessive — what an extraordinary chorus Blue Heron is. These singers radiate vocal health and ease of technique. Their ensemble sound is clear, firm in pitch, and rhythmically alive — so much so, in fact, that when director Scott Metcalfe’s notes mentioned the "dense polyphony" of the five-centuries-old music on the program, I were brought up short: what denseness? It didn’t seem at all odd that the First Congregational’s airy acoustic, problematical to some, proved in this case to be a friend — a warm, nurturing one — and not a foe.

Who was this Robert Jones? We have no dates of birth or death for him, only the intelligence that he was a singer in the Royal Household Chapel from "at least" 1520 "until about" 1534. The emergence of his glorious Missa spes nostra we owe to the English musicologist Nick Sandon, whose life’s work has been the painstaking reconstruction of music (by Aston, Taverner, and Ludford as well as Jones) from before the Reformation. From 1999 on, the Blue Heron folks have functioned as a pipeline for his startling discoveries. Lucky them. Lucky us.

Large, symphonic-breadth forms in music as early as Robert Jones’s can be startling to modern ears. It’s so old, so "pre-", it seems new. The stylistic mainspring of the Missa spes nostra is that of the seamless but non-repetitive, endlessly unfolding variation. Jones commands an impressive array of devices keep it all going. One is his light, propulsive, never-quite-predictable rhythms. Another is his richly varied "orchestration" of voices. The Gloria sported some confrontational sonorities — two very high treble parts a continent’s distance away from the bass, it seemed, and with nothing in between — as extreme as any in a Shostakovich slow movement. What lingers in the memory, however, is the peculiar glow to the melodic shapes that came and went amid the welter of ongoing variation. Jones, himself a singer, must have been a wonderful composer of songs — an English Dufay perhaps. How vexing to learn that the bass part of a three-part song is all that remains.

It was a risky venture to plant two new pieces, Trisagion 1521 and Kyrie Gloria tibi Trinitas, by Elliott Gyger between the two halves of the Mass, but the former’s legerdemain (three voices in three languages, cannily intermingled) and formal shapeliness were disarming, as was the latter’s fusing of "old music" rhythms with scarily difficult "new music" intervals. For Blue Heron, it was all a breeze. On this level as well were Thomas Tallis’s Loquebantur variis linguis and the encore, Taverner’s Dum transisset sabbatum. For any readers who may be sick with envy and self-reproach at having missed this concert, balm is available (via downloads) at Blue Heron’s Web site, www.blueheronchoir.org. The two Gombert items may be the ones to start with.

BY RICHARD BUELL

Issue Date: August 13 - 19, 2004
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