Album Reviews

This charming 1978 Harmonia Mundi release was a big audiophile favorite when vinyl was still king for reasons that will become obvious to you should you choose to pick up this Speakers Corner reissue.

The 17th century music, played with almost ponderous but appropriate dignity by the Clemencic Consort and arranged for both traditional western instruments (strings, cornets, trombones, trumpets, drums, lutes, virginals [an oblong plucked instrument similar to a harpsichord], harpsichords and small organs) and those found in Hungary and Transylvania at the time such as the cimbalom and the bagpipe comes from what’s called the Vietoris Codex (no relationship to MP3!) compiled around 1680 in the Hungarian- Slovakian-Ukranian and written in organ tablature.

Read the liner notes should you wish to know more. That’s what I did. What’s important to know is that this program includes dances, secular and spiritual songs, plus church and court music, all of which will conjure up fanciful images of medievals dancing and cavorting just as the cover painting of a couple dancing suggests.

The arrangements of the series of short compositions feature a wide variety of unusual instruments including the buzzy regal and the bombarde, a Cornish reed instrument that’s a cross between an oboe and the non-drone part of a bagpipe that produces melody. There are lutes, flutes, various percussion instruments, strings and brass, all combining to produce an ever-changing landscape of musical textures and tonalities.

The recording is a model of transparency, spectacular textural veracity (particularly the drums), harmonic fullness and staging bombast. The music’s mystery is well-served by a somewhat distant and depth-charged perspective, wet with reverberant ambiance.

You’ll feel immersed in the musical past, emotionally and physically and experience musical crosscurrents that combine British formality with what was, as the notes describe, music growing out of “ ...a unique cultural melting pot at the extreme fringe of the European world.”

I compared an original French pressing with a later bar-coded German one, and with this recent 180g reissue. The original French issue is best, containing both textural weight and cleanly drawn transient percussive sparkle. The bar-coded edition was bass-shy, and a bit too bright and “literal.” It missed the original’s mystery. The Speakers Corner reissue was somewhere in between, being sufficiently mysterious and deep but somewhat lacking in the original’s sparkle and airiness. Still, without comparison to the original, it is an excellent sounding reissue pressed on super quiet vinyl and well worth your attention.

If you like this, don’t pass up Speakers Corner’s reissue of another audiophile classic, this one from the ancient 1960s, the Archiv production commonly referred to as Dances of Terpsichore (Archiv SAPM 0198166) another musical and sonic spectacular that just keeps giving every listen (and I’ve been listening to my original since 1969!)