• In those far-off days before recording and broadcasting, the way to recreate the orchestral music you heard in the concert hall was to play it in domestic arrangements for piano duet. Now we have the real thing so easily available, why would you want to revisit these old versions? They can be quite revealing as examples of the way arrangers heard this music. The German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) was devoted to the music of Bach, and the piano duo Takahashi/Lehmann have just recorded all six of the Brandenburg Concertos in Reger’s duet transcriptions, together with a couple of organ works (Audite).
The result is a paradox: Reger’s own music tends towards the thickly scored and even glutinous, and he gives his Bach big, doubled bass lines which dominate the textures. But these two very skilful pianists lighten the textures, choose dancing speeds and crisp articulation, and create something that is quite delightful. So this is an enjoyably contemporary, rather postmodern collection.
• The eternally resourceful Tallis Scholars have been recording the Renaissance masses of Josquin des Prés for some years now – there are 11 discs so far – but with their latest instalment (Gimell) they hit tricky questions of attribution. His Missa Mater Patris has been debated because its style is so simple compared with his contrapuntal masterpieces, while the Missa Da pacem has now been transferred to the little-known Noel Bauldeweyn (active c1509-13).
Conductor Peter Phillips draws attention to the Et incarnatus est in the Bauldeweyn mass, whose expressive beauty beats the same text in the Josquin, which comes to a slightly clumsy end. As ever, the Tallis Scholars provide finely tuned, persuasive singing, beautifully recorded in Merton College chapel, Oxford.
• The way in which Renaissance composers ingeniously used models both sacred and secular as the basis for their music is shown by Josquin’s use of Brumel’s motet Mater patris et filia. On a recent Radio 3 Early Music Show (BBC Sounds), Hannah French provided a good account of mass settings that use the secular song Western Wind, with its surprisingly un-mass-like text: “Christ, that my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again!”
