Editorial Reviews

With a great variety of new authentic-performance recordings of this landmark piece of sacred music on the market -- from Gardiner, Herreweghe, Jacobs, Savall, you name it -- and with each vying to produce a richer, more resonant version, it's a bit of a shock to encounter this plain, straight-ahead version. It has a well-drilled English choir, a simple, mostly modern ensemble of strings and winds (there are sackbuts) with organ, no antiphons (and no mass, which leaves a lot of empty space on each disc), everything performed at pitch, and a thoroughgoing atmosphere of churchly restraint, with soloists quietly emerging from the choir periodically with perfect English cathedral-school voices. The disc may in fact be unusually successful just because it sounds so different from almost all the other discs on the market, and because it sounds similar to the ways in which choristers who sang the "Vespers" in the 1970s may have encountered the work. The bottom line is that the performance works well on its own terms even if it may not much resemble what Monteverdi had in mind (and who really knows about that, anyway?). The small Rodolfus Choir, its members all under 25, is at its best in limpid movements like the "Ave Maris Stella" (disc 2, track 3), perhaps too bland in the really big ones, and the balance among the forces is very elegantly done. It may be that the "Vespers of 1610" represent a work that, from the modern perspective, can simply be illuminated from too many different directions to essentially be captured on a single recording. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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