Ockeghem: Missa Prolationum in Full Glory

Few composers have been more thoroughly misunderstood by posterity than Johannes Ockeghem. The textbooks reach for words like “complex” and “contrapuntal” and “austere” — all technically accurate, all missing the point. What Ockeghem actually wrote, at his best, is music of extraordinary luminosity, long-breathed and mysterious, like light moving through deep water. The Missa Prolationum is his most celebrated achievement, and also the one most likely to be described admiringly and heard rarely.

The reason is simple enough. The mass is built entirely on mensuration canons — “prolation canons,” in the terminology of the day — in which each voice sings the same melody simultaneously but in different rhythmic proportions, so that the intervals between the voices shift continuously as the piece unfolds. Getting the mechanics right is hard. Getting them right while also making music that breathes and phrases and goes somewhere — that’s the real challenge, and it’s where recordings of this work have so often stumbled.

Ensemble Musica Nova takes a spacious approach. Their reading of the Missa Prolationum runs to just over forty minutes — notably broader than the Hilliard Ensemble’s interpretation, which comes in closer to thirty-five. The Hilliards, characteristically, press forward with a kind of lean, purposeful energy; their opening “Kyrie eleison” is beautifully shaped, the line molded with conviction from the first note. Against that, Ensemble Musica Nova unfolds the same material more slowly, and the question worth asking is whether the slower tempo serves the music or merely allows the performers more time to negotiate its difficulties.

Honestly — both, at different moments.

The two motets that frame the mass give a clearer picture of what this ensemble does well. The Alma Redemptoris Mater is ravishing in their hands, the soprano voices riding above a rich, sustained foundation from the lower parts. Ockeghem’s harmonic world is unlike anyone else’s — you can hear why Josquin and the entire next generation of Flemish composers regarded him as something close to a god — and Ensemble Musica Nova captures that particular quality of suspended, hovering serenity. The Salve Regina is even finer: ten minutes of music that seems to exist outside of ordinary time, and the ensemble sustains that quality without forcing it.

The question of Latin pronunciation will distract some listeners and bore others. Ensemble Musica Nova sings in the French manner — the u in “Agnus Dei” pronounced as a French u, not the more open Italian or quasi-English vowel that most British ensembles favor. We don’t actually know how Latin sounded in a Flemish chapel in the 1470s, so any choice involves some guesswork, and the French pronunciation has at least the virtue of being historically plausible. What it costs is a certain brightness of vowel color, particularly in exposed soprano passages, where the rounder French sound can feel slightly veiled.

Other recordings deserve mention. The Schola Cantorum Stuttgart and the Musica Ficta ensemble on Naxos have both taken on the Missa Prolationum, and the Clerks Group made a recording on ASV that was widely praised when it appeared — less widely heard now, since copies are scarce and expensive on the secondary market. The Tallis Scholars, who have recorded two Ockeghem masses and done splendid things with the analogous mensuration canons in Josquin’s Missa sine nomine and Missa ad fugam, have never, to my knowledge, recorded this particular work. That remains a gap.

Ensemble Musica Nova is a French ensemble, and their approach reflects a French sensibility — more interested in atmosphere and blend than in rhythmic incisiveness. There are moments in the Missa Prolationum where you want sharper edges, where the counterpoint needs to cut rather than glow. The Hilliards deliver that more reliably. But there are also moments — particularly in the Agnus Dei, where Ockeghem’s canonic writing reaches its most intricate — where Ensemble Musica Nova’s patience pays off in a way that feels genuinely revelatory.

Not a first choice for the mass itself. But for the motets, and for listeners who prize atmosphere over precision, a album with real claims on the attention.