Quick Spins

BACH: SIX CONCERTOS FOR THE MARGRAVE OF BRANDENBURG

Trevor Pinnock and the European Brandenburg Ensemble

Twenty-five years ago, Trevor Pinnock made a landmark recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos with the English Concert, the period-instrument ensemble that the English conductor and harpsichordist would go on to lead for decades more. Archiv, the period-instrument label for Deutsche Grammophon, made these clear and fresh recordings the centerpieces of the catalogue, and few home disc collections go without a set. Now retired from the Concert, Pinnock has returned to Bach's six marvelous gems with the European Brandenburg Ensemble, a responsive pickup group formed for the occasion. The recording on the independent Avie label emerges as a worthy endeavor, with Pinnock showing that he has intelligently rethought the works.

Bach comes out less as the scintillating playmaster, as he is often portrayed in the original recording, and more as music's deep-thinking architect. In the sensitively balanced First and Third concertos, or the more colorful and ornate Second and Fourth, there is still all the back-and-forth that places the composer squarely in the baroque. Pinnock highlights the chunky dollops of counterpoint and the generous applications of fleetly drawn lines. At the same time, these discs reveal a sense of pacing and rhythm in Bach that presage the drawn-out textures of the romantic era and the avant-garde experiments of modernism. Harmonic clashes arise, while adagios have become slower, allegros quicker, gratefully without sacrifices in spirit and detail.

Pinnock seems have to lost nothing of his virtuosity, and that maddeningly busy and beautiful cadenza in the Fifth Concerto brings out spectral colors. The chemistry among the musicians is readily apparent in all the call-and-response moments, and the group infuses an alluringly dark richness to Concerto No. 6 that persists in the mind long after the sounding of the last bars.

-- Daniel Ginsberg

SCATTERED RHYMES

Orlando Consort with Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir

Probing the line between very old and very new music, the Orlando Consort's latest CD sometimes makes it difficult to tell which is which. The body of this recording is a juxtaposition of a 14th-century Mass by Guillaume de Machaut with a musical deconstruction of the same work from 2006 by the 30-year-old British composer Tarik O'Regan, who sets to music 14th-century love poems by Petrarch and an anonymous English source (writing in Latin). The O'Regan piece -- in which the four-member Consort sings the Petrarch and the Estonian Chamber Choir, the English poems -- sounds exquisite and delicate. The Machaut, by contrast, sounds as if its at the limits of what music is able to contain, as if the unaccompanied voices were wandering the cold landscapes of distant planets. With its weird, gritty timbres, its uncomfortable harmonies, its unfurling strands of music leading ever farther down unexplored paths, it sounds ageless. It could have been written yesterday.

The works also juxtapose love (O'Regan) and death (Machaut), and these two themes are taken up in two smaller-scale old/new pairings: Gavin Bryars's 2000 "Super Flumina" and Guillaume Dufay's "Ave Regina Celorum" are soft and wistful prayers to the Virgin (Dufay's written to be performed at the moment of his own death), while O'Regan and Machaut are again represented with settings of the same text, "Douce Dame Jolie." O'Regan again takes Machaut's text and puts it through a musical refractor so that the single flowing line of the original fans out in a blossom of syncopated sound.

The result is a kaleidoscope of color for the ear that shows the variety and modernity of so-called early music.

-- Anne Midgette

CHANT: MUSIC FOR THE SOUL

Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz

Every decade or so, it seems, a Gregorian-chant recording called "Chant," documenting actual monks singing their actual music, becomes a popular success. In 1994, it was the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. This month, "Chant: Music for the Soul," by the Cistercian monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz in Vienna, was pre-released on iTunes and went straight to the top of the iTunes charts (though no one says how many sales that actually entails).

These recordings are advertised as filling many of the functions that laypeople commonly ascribe to classical music: They are relaxing, spiritual and make good background listening. This is not meant to denigrate their musical value; indeed, the undeniable honesty and rough-hewn solidity of the singing is one of this disc's appeals. It certainly documents a living musical tradition extending back many centuries and updated over the years -- these monks may be more mellifluous in their approach than their 13th-century predecessors -- offering a complete mass and an "Ad Completorium," punctuated by a track of the abbey's bells.

Criticism is beside the point: The goal here is to present a genuine artifact, a document of a worship tradition, rather than the adornment of art. That, at least, is the monks' presumable goal; one may assume that the record label has far more worldly ambitions.

-- Anne Midgette