Allegri: Miserere, Messe, Motets - A Sei Voci, Fabre-Garrus

Allegri's Miserere, composed for the Sistine Chapel, was for a long time the exclusive property of the papacy. It was performed once a year, on the eve of Easter Sunday, in complete darkness. One day, after hearing it in Rome, a young man by the name of Mozart wrote it out from memory!

Allegri’s Miserere has had a lot of analysis. The Tallis Scholars offered two variations on the usual English interpretation, first as they usually sing it, then with increasingly elaborate embellishments worked out in performance by Deborah Roberts, all notated in the booklet. Before that, shortly after the disc under review appeared, Hugh Keyte prepared an edition of a setting by Tommaso Bai (c. 1650–1714) that is directly related to the performance tradition dominated by Allegri’s setting for the Sistine Chapel. Martin Neary recorded both the modern Allegri and the Bai adaptation, while Graham O’Reilly followed six years later with another recording of Bai that was incorrectly described as a world premiere. Even earlier, Keyte had prepared a version of Allegri’s work that showed how the performing tradition might have unfolded at the Sistine Chapel, and Andrew Parrott recorded it with successive verses displaying different stages of the tradition.

This disc also gives us two versions of the psalm, the first a new edition by Jean Lionnet based on 17th-century sources of the earliest performance practice. It sounds quite unlike anything else we have heard, of course, as Hugh Keyte indicated. The disc ends with the usual English traditional version as George Guest edited it. But between the two versions of the psalm is a whole program of other sacred music by Allegri. This same Mass was once recorded by George Guest on a Meridian LP, but never reissued on CD. It offers the familiar contrast of a choir of boys and men compared with a vocal ensemble singing one voice to a part. The other three motets appear to be first recordings. The Mass is filled out with three chant Propers, an introit, gradual, and alleluia verse (the last ignored in the list of contents). The chant performance is an interesting but unidentified example of chant practice of the time. It would have passed unnoticed but for Theodore C. Karp’s recent book and CD, which demonstrates that in that era there were occasional notes sung at half the value of the usual equal-note time.

It’s notable that A Sei Voci imported Ruth Holton, a member of the Tallis Scholars, though not their usual soloist in the Miserere, to sing with them. She gets a large share of the credit in making the concluding familiar form of the piece so wonderfully appealing. There are too many fine versions of the piece to count anymore, but the several historical approaches cited above are a useful supplement if one is to understand how this fascinating piece has evolved.