Percival’s Lament – Medieval Music and the Holy Grail
Capilla Antigua de Chinchilla/José Ferrero
NAXOS 8.572800 (54.25)
There is something genuinely strange about the Holy Grail as a subject for a medieval music anthology — strange in the best way, because the legend itself is unresolved, perpetually unfinished, circling its own center without ever quite arriving. Chrétien de Troyes, who gave us the first extended Grail narrative in Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, never finished it. The poem stops mid-sentence, somewhere in the twelfth century, and several later poets — Gerbert de Montreuil, Manessier — tried to close the wound. They never quite did.
Which makes the decision to list Chrétien de Troyes as a composer on this disc more than puzzling. It is a small scholarly scandal.
Elizabeth Aubrey’s The Music of the Troubadours — still the authoritative English-language study of the repertoire — makes no mention of Chrétien as a melodist. He wasn’t one. He was the greatest writer of Old French courtly romance, a man who worked under the sophisticated patronage of Marie de Champagne and shaped the imaginative vocabulary of European literature for centuries — but he left no music. None. The booklet offers no explanation for where these attributed melodies originate. Contrafacta? Conjecture? The liner notes are silent, and texts are apparently available only online, which in 2012 already felt like a way of saying: we’d rather you didn’t look too closely.
That caveat registered, let’s be fair about what the Capilla Antigua de Chinchilla actually delivers here.
Founded in 2002 and based in Spain — I heard them in Toledo some years ago, in a church interior that seemed purpose-built for this music, all cool stone and reverberant air — the ensemble is organized around its director, the tenor José Ferrero. He’s a thoughtful player, attentive to textual nuance in a way that not every early-music tenor bothers to be, and his own singing has an appealing directness, lean and unmannered. The countertenor Juan Francisco Sanz brings a different color — cooler, more withdrawn — and the contrast between their voices gives the program some of its best moments.
Then there is the mezzo-soprano Luisa Maesso. Her voice is not unpleasant. But for this repertoire — the sliding modal inflections, the intimate scale of trouvère song, the need for a certain translucency — she brings a weight and a vibrato that feel mismatched. Like hearing Debussy played on a Bösendorfer when the music wants a fortepiano. The sound is real, but the grain is wrong.
The instrumental forces interest me more. Psaltery, Anglo-Saxon lyre, darbuka — the ensemble navigates the ethnological hazards of medieval reconstruction with more care than many. The danger in this repertoire is always the same: modern performers either scrub the music into a kind of antiseptic folk song, or they pile on exotic percussion until the whole thing sounds like a Renaissance fair. The Capilla largely avoids both traps. The texted songs and the instrumental dances are varied with some intelligence, and the program draws on German, French, Italian, and English sources — a genuinely pan-European sweep that reflects the way the Grail legend itself migrated across linguistic borders.
“Percival’s Lament” is played instrumentally, which is either a missed opportunity or an appropriate gesture toward the unspoken — I genuinely cannot decide which. Given that Chrétien’s Percival is not notably a figure of lamentation but of stubborn, sometimes obtuse persistence, the elegiac treatment feels like a later projection onto the character. Wagner, hovering distantly over all of this, has a lot to answer for.
The program succeeds best as atmosphere, as evocation — and that is both its strength and its limitation. As scholarship it raises questions it does not answer. As listening, on a gray afternoon, with some patience for the genre’s conventions, it rewards. Not everything needs to be Sequentia or the Ensemble Organum. But those ensembles set a standard of documentation and interpretive rigor that this disc doesn’t quite reach.
Worth having, with reservations clearly attached.
