Suspicious Cheese Lords' "Vivat rex!"

A new recording from the Washington-based male choral ensemble, "The Suspicious Cheese Lords," is a collection of world premiere recordings of music by the early 16th century French master Jean Mouton (d. 1622).  As has become their modus operandus, the Lords have picked out a Renaissance composer of choral music whose work is not well known and put together an interesting cross-section of material exploring different genres, in this case including a mass and 8 motets in different styles.

The Lords is not a highly polished professional group, but rather a bunch of talented amateurs who drifted into becoming a performing and recording group when their informal sessions of dinner-plus-sight-reading evolved into occasional local concerts and, now, a full-blown existence with some touring and self-produced recording.  The group's CDs are available through cdbaby.com.

This release marks an important technical advance in the quality of sound recording that they are achieving.  Through the relationships they have formed with various Washington-area churches through their concert appearances, they have been able to find interesting acoustical spaces in which to record, but this is the first of their recordings that has -- at least in my opinion -- achieved an excellent balance of acoustical place and musical beauty.  It is difficult to record a small choral group in a large church space; microphone placement and volume are both crucial.  In this case, there is plenty of warmth and good definition, but a sense of the large acoustical space is also captured.

Cheese Lord productions are high quality affairs by comparison to other artist-self-produced projects I've seen.  A beautiful appropriate period illustration graces the cover, an accomplished musicologist has written the notes, full texts and translations are given, and the somewhat jokey name of the group ("Suspicious Cheese Lords" is a humorously punning mistranslation of the title of a Thomas Tallis motet, Suscipe quaeso Domine) is reflected in the interior illustration on the inlay card - a fine photograph of a sheep - Mouton, get it?

Jean Mouton spent time as a court musician for the French monarchy, and was an accomplished polyphonists whose works achieved wide acceptance inn 16th century western Europe, to judge by the presence of manuscripts and the references in surviving writings, but not until recently has there been a scholarly attempt to publish a complete critical edition of his works, which has so far produced just a first volume from AR.  Some of the Lords' performances on this disc have a slightly rough quality in terms of rhythmic integration, perhaps reflecting varied amounts of rehearsal work on particular pieces, but one gets a vivid sense of Mouton's qualities.  I already had several Mouton pieces in my recording collection from a variety of sources, but not one track on this new recording was a repertory duplication, tending to support their claim that the disc is entirely composed of world premiere recordings.  (But greater experts than I will undoubtedly address the issue as this release makes its rounds among the journals and record reviews.)

For now I will conclude that this is a worthy project bringing to light interesting repertory of a largely-overlooked but important musical figure, definitely worth acquiring if you have a taste for the period.