Le Jeune: Chansons – Ensemble Clément Janequin

Somewhere in the archive of my own listening life there is a memory of Ensemble Clément Janequin coming through Boston years ago — I want to say Emmanuel Church, though memory plays tricks — and even then, unaccompanied, four or five men standing close together in that dry acoustic, they produced a sound so lean and so exactly tuned that it made you understand why the French have never quite trusted the English cathedral tradition of choral singing. Too much bloom, not enough consonant. This new-old disc, a reissue of work the ensemble first undertook two decades before it as young men rediscovering their own patrimony, confirms that the group’s signature virtue — clarity of diction wedded to harmonic pungency — has not dimmed with the passing of a generation of tenors.

Claude Le Jeune is not a composer American audiences know well. Trained in the same Franco-Flemish contrapuntal tradition that produced Lassus and Sweelinck, he threw in his lot with the Huguenot cause and spent much of his career setting metrical psalms, more than 350 of them, an output that places him somewhere between Goudimel and the coming tide of French Baroque sacred music. He was also a composer of secular chansons steeped in the humanist doctrine of musique mesurée, the sixteenth-century experiment in which musical rhythm was meant to follow the quantities of classical verse as though French could be scanned like Latin hexameter. It rarely can, not comfortably, and the strain of that ambition gives Le Jeune’s chansons their peculiar rhythmic snap, syncopations that sound almost jazz-inflected, four centuries early.

“Tout ce qui est plus beau” unfolds with an unhurried, almost conversational grace, the tenor line floating atop the ensemble with a poise that never curdles into preciousness. Elsewhere, in “Un puce j’ay dedans l’oreille,” a text as bawdy as its title implies, something about a flea in the ear, and you may draw your own conclusions, the singers let a little theatrical wit show through without once sacrificing tuning. That is harder than it sounds. Chromatic side-slips of the kind Le Jeune favors, those sudden false relations between adjacent voices, expose any ensemble whose blend is merely approximate. This one’s isn’t.

The addition of lute, organ, and viola da gamba is tactfully done. Nothing showy. The continuo breathes under the voices rather than propping them up, coloring cadences with a faint reedy sourness from the organ that I found unexpectedly moving, an antique sound-world evoked without archival fussiness.

Missing from this program, alas, is “Revoici venir du printemps,” probably Le Jeune’s single most beloved chanson and the piece by which most listeners first encounter him. A small disappointment, and one wonders why the programmers chose to omit the composer’s calling card from a disc meant partly to introduce him. But what remains rewards patience. “Perdre rien,” barely three minutes, packs in more harmonic incident than works three times its length. Le Jeune was a master of compression, never wasting a bar.

As for Harmonia Mundi’s presentation, the fake vinyl-look CD face, the cardboard sleeve threatening at every handling to eject the disc onto the floor, I confess irritation. Budget-price ingenuity has its limits, and directing listeners to a website for texts that then arrive, if at all, in sixteenth-century French dialect without translation strikes me as a curious idea of user-friendliness. Bring back liner notes. Real ones, printed, in a language more of us can read.

None of which diminishes the singing. This remains some of the most idiomatic French Renaissance vocal music-making available, and at bargain price it deserves a place beside the ensemble’s Janequin recordings for anyone curious about the more chromatic, more experimental byways of the sixteenth century. Dyer’s rule of thumb, learned across forty years of reviewing: when the French sing their own old music this well, get out of the way and listen.