Three Renaissance Recordings: Sacred

When Professor Laurie Stras, co-director of the early music female vocal ensemble Musica Secreta, came across a collection of settings of Lamentations in Florence's Biblioteca Nazionale, it was not immediately clear that what she had in her hands was the complete score of Antoine Brumel's Lamentations of Jeremiah for Good Friday.

Brumel's Lamentations allude to the Tenebrae (Lat. darkness) services in which verses from the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah were intoned.  Central to the Tenebrae is the belief that the most forbidding darkness can still be pierced by light. Brumel’s work is akin to a vast painting or tableau vivant telling the tragedy of the destruction of a city as seen through the eyes of Christ on the cross in a way that is both completely personal and at the same time universal. 

The symphonic proportions of the five 'acts' totalling approximately forty-five minutes, make the composition both impressive and unique in Renaissance repertoire. The Lamentations have no apparent liturgical function but, are likely to have been composed for performance during Holy Week, when every Christian worshipper would re-live the story of Christ's last days through the Tenebrae liturgy.

For the recording, Musica Secreta have paired Brumel's Lamentations with a collection of vocal music copied by Fra Antonio Moro, the same monk who was responsible for copying the Lamentations.  Compiled for a Florentine nunnery, the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript belonged to two nuns: Suor Agnoleta Biffoli and Suor Clemenzia Sostegni whose names can be found both on the book binding and embedded in its extensive decorations. The manuscript documents the entire liturgical year of a convent in 76 works of which only nine - including Moro's own Sancta Maria succurre miseris – can be attributed.