Christmas is the theme that runs through this CD, and, with the intensely virile sound of the male-voice choir of Riga Cathedral, we can get a vivid idea of what this music would have sounded like half a millennium ago.
But a new recording from the award-winning Schola Cantorum Riga reveals a tradition full of exibility and variation, even improvisation — music that, far from being fixed, evolves and adapts to different countries and contexts. Instead, as Guntars Pranis and his musicians demonstrate here, often these notes were just the starting point for performances that blended ofifcial chant melodies with polyphonic and folk influences, voices with local instrumental textures and accompaniments. Any expectations of severe musical simplicity are banished in the opening seconds of the recording.
A drum sets up a marching pulse, quickly joined by the buzzing hum of the hurdy-gurdy, whose drone is the anchor for a flighty, bird-like recorder. Home to the largest medieval church in the Baltics, Riga also houses the Riga Missal — the first musical document in Latvian history. Imagining the sounds of medieval Riga, and dispelling any sense of stuffy, voice-bound-to-text performance practice, this is a collection of chants backed by instruments such as the bagpipes, hurdy gurdy and the kokle , a Baltic zither.
It is a remarkable adventure. The performers are the Schola Cantorum Riga the resident vocal group of Riga Cathedral the largest cathedral of the Baltics ; and the disc encompasses repertoire from their home city in what would then have been known as Livonia rather than Latvia as well as Hamburg, Lund and Limoges: unexpectedly cosmopolitan, one might suggest.
Although we're in a different era, one might suggest this disc as a perfect companion to a previous disc recommended by Classical Explorer : The Suspended Harp of Babel on ECM, a celebration of the Estonian tradition in the music of Kreek.
