Holy Week has inspired countless settings of devotional texts including The Book of Lamentations where the Prophet Jeremiah laments the destruction of Jerusalem. Its narrative prompted numerous settings by Renaissance composers from Byrd to Victoria, that by Tallis being the best known. Reformation composers, especially English ones, took the text as a metaphor for the suppression of the Catholic Church.
A cappella polyphony later yielded to accompanied solo and mixed voice writing in cantata-style settings by Baroque composers such as Durante, Gilles and Zelenka. While the Romantics ignored the text, a revival last century triggered a stylistically varied response from Ginastera, Krenek, Stravinsky (Threni) and Weill and, in England, a setting by Sir Edward Bairstow.
1Frenchman Antoine Brumel (c1460–1512/13) captures the despair of Jerusalem with music of great solemnity in these austere Lamentations conceived for lower voices, performed here by Vox Luminis under director Lionel Meunier.
2Of all Spain’s Golden Age composers, it was Cristóbal de Morales (1500-1553) who earned the most fulsome praise from his contemporaries and was the first Iberian composer to gain an international reputation. His Seven Lamentations comprise music of astonishing polyphonic beauty and rapt intensity – qualities readily discernible in this performance by Belgium ensemble Utopia.
3English composer Robert White (1538-1574) produced two accounts, of which his extended Lamentations a 6, sung here by Nordic Voices, alternates passages for two, three and four voices with the full ensemble. Enjoy the false relations!
4The Lamentations by little-known Italian composer Emilio de Cavalieri (c1550-1602) are for mixed voices, organ and strings. Le Poème Harmonique under Vincent Dumestre clearly enjoys Cavalieri’s startling harmonies and florid melismas.