Recent recordings of plainchant

Extract

One new recording is a landmark of sorts, for the line of choirmasters at Solesmes runs from Dom André Mocquereau (1889–1914), Dom Joseph Gajard (1914–71), Dom Jean Claire (1971–96), and an interim visitor from St Benoît-du-Lac, Dom Richard Gagné (1996–2003), to a young monk of Solesmes, frère Yves-Marie Lelièvre. His first recording (no. 1 in the list below) offers the Mass Propers for the first three Sundays of Ordinary Time, formerly the Sundays after Epiphany, a programme that matches Dom Gajard’s last recording directing the nuns of Argentan in 1971 (7536 in my discography). Two of those chants have been replaced here, as in the Graduale Triplex, and the expanded playing time of a CD has been given over to seven organ selections played on the abbey’s Schwenkedel organ by Jacques Kauffmann of Paris. Frère Lelièvre selected a schola of twenty-one monks, perhaps not much smaller than Dom Claire used, and elicited a lightness of execution that simply must be heard. There is a forward motion in the singing that is particularly effective in the melismas. Just hear the seldom-recorded gradual ‘Benedictus Dominus’. This is the portent of a fine series of recordings.