There are a number of cartoons from the last century that show those rude fellows, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz, assaulting well-bred ears in various unseemly, not to say fiendish, ways. Contemplating the apparent taste of our times for records featuring trumpet and organ, brass quintet and organ, massed hunting horns and organ, timpani choir and organ (well, why not?), not to speak of 119.50 decibel hard-rock bands, one is inclined to wonder if it isn't all another sign of the jaded sensibilities of our terrible times--a crying for madder music and for stronger wine, as it were. Well, I don't know about the rock bands, but most of the other stuff the Baroque would have recognized as an eminently satisfactory way of making a joyful noise unto the Lord or the Emperor or whoever. Perhaps if anyone was weird, it was those tippytoe Victorians! Though I suspect their easily-shattered delicacy was more often pose than reality.
Most of the pieces on this record are modern arrangements, though those on the first side are basically and familiarly Baroque. Handel's so-called "Water Music" was already the subject of transcription long before the composer's death, and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus,'' which at Christmas time permeates department stores and dentists' offices (inside dental-music) in arrangements for harp and massed saxophones, is surely deserving of a version more in keeping with its nature. It was Dame Myra Hess's piano arrangement of the Chorale from Bach's cantata No. 147, "Jesu, joy of man's desiring," that made the Cantor a best-seller after 200 years; I see by WERM that it has also been recorded in arrangements for organ, band, two pianos, two harps, orchestra, four pianos, and mouth-organ.
Side two is something of a mixed bag. The one Baroque item, Rameau's “Hymn to the Night'', turns out to be a chorus from the first act of the opera "Hippolyte et Aricie" in which priestesses hymn their patron goddess, Diana. Though she is the lunar goddess, her role in that work is as the power of chastity (which does poor Hippolytus, the virgin jock, in). The night-hymn notion is, I suspect, one of those nineteenth-century quasi-religious effusions like Gounod's "Ave Maria," based on the first prelude of the Well-tempered Clavier. Anyhow the French have produced a slew of recordings of it by choirs with such fascinating names as "Copper Cross Chorus" and "The Disciples of Gretry.'' Of the Anonymous Spanish processional I can tell you nothing except that fauxbourdon or faburden signified different things at different times and places; in the sixteenth century it was often likely to refer to an elaboration of a discant a third above the cantus firmus melody. Faure's "Hymn of Jean Racine," to a text by the great dramatic poet, is a song to the Savior, simple and severe, dating from the composer's twentieth year, and originally scored for four voices, string quartet, and reed-organ. Michel Colombier I should guess to be contemporary, though he appears in none of my reference books, despite his at least 335 compositions. (No doubt Baker's Dictionary has all the data on him, but I don't have it at hand.) Since the sextet appears to be written for such a combination as the one heard here, I might guess it to have been written for it. (The name of organist Xavier Darasse is by now familiar to record buffs, who should also recognize those of trumpeters Thibaud and Jeannoutot, as well as that of hornist Barboteu, all of whom have solo recordings to their credit.)
