Venetian Coronation – McCreesh and Gabrieli Consort

Somewhere in the Doge’s Palace in 1595, brass sounded across water, and the Venetian state made an argument for itself in sound. That argument — that music could be an instrument of civic theology, that a coronation was as much sonic architecture as political ritual — is what Paul McCreesh set out to reconstruct back in 1989. Hearing it again after all these years, I’m struck less by its scholarly apparatus than by its sheer nerve.

This was a young man’s recording. You can hear it in the risks taken, in the willingness to let the brass choirs of St. Mark’s blaze rather than blend. McCreesh was not yet the grand old man of historically informed reconstruction he’d become; here he was inventing a genre, more or less, the “imagined event” disc, and Virgin gave him the resources — engineers, venue, personnel — to pull it off without apology.

The Gabrieli Consort and Players in 1989 were not the polished, internationally seasoned ensemble they’d later be. There’s a rawness to the brass attacks, a grain to the cornetti, that I find preferable to the enamel finish more recent recordings often prize. Giovanni Gabrieli’s canzonas and sonatas — the antiphonal writing that made San Marco itself an instrument, choirs answering choirs across the octagonal spaces of the basilica — come off here with real physical menace. And Cesare Bendinelli’s contribution, the Sonata 333 with its martial drums, still raises the hair on the back of my neck. It’s crude, ceremonial music, trumpet fanfare stuff, and McCreesh doesn’t try to civilize it. Good. Then Magnus Thomsen’s Toccata, cut from the 2002 remake entirely. A real loss, that omission, because it provides exactly the kind of processional swagger the reconstruction needs before the ear settles into the liturgical material proper.

At the center of the disc: movements from Andrea Gabrieli’s mass, sung with a gravity that never curdles into solemnity. Andrea doesn’t get his due, overshadowed as he permanently is by his more famous nephew, but this is some of the most refined polyphony to come out of the second half of the Cinquecento. The interpretation here treats it with the seriousness it deserves without turning it into a museum piece. The vocal roster is worth pausing over — Paul Agnew, Charles Daniels, Christopher Purves, names that in 1989 meant promise and now mean something closer to institution. You can hear, even this early, why.

James O’Donnell and Timothy Roberts handle the two organs with a discretion that never draws attention to itself, which is exactly right; this is music where the instruments are meant to disappear into the acoustic fabric of the ceremony, not audition for solo billing. The closing “Omnes gentes” brings the whole edifice to a close that is, frankly, thrilling, the kind of climax that justifies the entire speculative premise of the project.

Sonically the album holds up remarkably well after all this time. Virgin’s engineers understood how to capture antiphonal spatial effects without turning them into a gimmick, no small feat given how easily this repertoire tips into audiophile showing-off.

McCreesh returned to this same coronation for Signum in 2002, benefiting from thirteen years of additional scholarship, and reviewers elsewhere have parsed the differences between versions in exhausting detail. I won’t relitigate that comparison here, not having the newer disc at hand as I write. But I’d gently push back against any assumption that the remake simply supersedes the original. Scholarship refines; it doesn’t always improve the theater. There’s a hunger in this 1989 account, an eagerness bordering on recklessness, that the more considered later version may well have smoothed away in the name of accuracy.

Virgin’s reissue, to its credit, retains McCreesh’s original notes alongside a new essay from Mark Audus on the recording’s genesis. No texts or translations, true, but the musicological context is generous by today’s stingy reissue standards. Worth having, this. Worth returning to, even for those who already own the remake. This is where the idea began, and ideas at their beginning have an electricity that refinement sometimes dilutes.