Ludwig Daser: Polyphonic Masses

The Belgian-based Huelgas Ensemble has spent the past half-century combining scholarly detective work with singing of translucent beauty. Its home ground is Renaissance polyphony. And this recording introduces listeners to the world of Ludwig Daser, a Protestant-leaning composer at the Catholic court of the Dukes of Bavaria in 1550s Munich. Overshadowed by more glamorous contemporaries, his reputation rests on settings of the Latin Mass. There are two on this album: his monumentally elaborate six-part Missa Preter rerum seriem, and the more straightforward four-part Missa Fors seullement. They both look back to models from the past, and would have seemed conservative, if not old-fashioned, in their own time. But in ours, they simply sound sublime. These performances are radiant: strong but supple, captured in a resonant acoustic that allows the voices to be simultaneously clear and rich.