Album review: An expressive dip into Renaissance polyphony with Richafort Requiem

January 14 is said to be the most depressing day of the year, so why not celebrate its passing the next day? I recommend the Requiem by Jean Richafort, from the early 1520s.

Somehow shuffled into the dustier reaches of my review shelves was an August, 2012 Hyperion release by pan-European vocal sextet Cinquecento Renaissance Vokal. Besides Richafort’s Requiem, written following the death of Josquin des Prez in 1521, the album features a beautiful mix of sacred and secular pieces by Richafort’s contemporaries, including Josquin, Nicholas Gombert, Jheronimus Vinders and Benedictus Appenzeller.

The mix of sacred and secular is deliberate — especially as we first hear Josquin’s madrigal Faulte d’argent (about the misery of being poor), which then finds its melodic material woven through Richafort’s Requiem.

As Stephen Rice writes in his otherwise opaque booklet essay, “the appropriation of profane material in sacred music of this period is well known, and its use in the most solemn of surroundings underlines the ease with which the Renaissance mind conflated the sacred and secular — or, perhaps, saw religion permeating all aspects of secular life.”

The six men of Cinquecento — with the help of an extra baritone on the final piece, written for seven voices — have beautiful voices that blend and balance seamlessly. This is an excellent introduction to music at once simple in the direct link between sound and emotion and complex in the way each vocal part entwines with the others.

You’ll find all the details here.

Here is Cinquecento with Nymphes des bois, a death lament by Josquin found on the album:

John Terauds