SUNDAYS IN ORDINARY TIME
(1–3)
•
Yves-Marie Lelièvre, dir; Monks of Solesmes; Jacques Kauffmann (org)
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PARACLETE SN 18 (66:17
Text and Translation)
Since its first review (
Fanfare
29:4), this recording has remained a touchstone of chant singing, even though the monks who were once at the center of chant research no longer dominate the field of chant recordings as they once did. It came to the fore again as I began to enter chant records into the database of a new Web site that will soon make the total chant discography available to all. Its elegance, its utter rightness once more became evident as I listened to a continuing flow of other recent CDs for the purpose of analyzing their contents. This was the first recording under the young monk, not yet ordained at the time, who succeeded an interim visiting director after a succession of famous names in chant research had directed the choir since the time of the abbey’s founder, Dom Guéranger. (Dom Joseph Pothier and Dom André Mocquereau never recorded with the monks, but each made several discs in Rome in April 1904.) Just about the time the record appeared, the
New York Times
published a lengthy article about Yves-Marie Lelièvre, his musicianly background, and his new responsibility. The title of the disc led me to believe that this would be the first in a series of Sunday Mass Propers, but there is no sign of a continuation and my optimism may have been misplaced.
The chants are sung unaccompanied, as always on Solesmes records if not in the daily Office. (Mass Propers, however, are not accompanied.) The fine Schwenkedel organ of 1967 is heard only in organ works that have been inserted to space out the groups of chants. I particularly liked the Bach-Vivaldi concerto movement at the end, but my only reservation about the disc was the 25 minutes of organ music, too much of it for my idea of a chant collection. When Dom Joseph Gajard directed the nuns of Argentan in virtually the same set of Propers, then identified as Sundays after Epiphany, the chants alone were enough to fill the LP nicely. But that was then.
The abbey is observing this year the millennium of its original foundation in 1010. (Dom Guéranger reopened the abbey in 1833 after it had been closed during the Revolution.) We can only hope that Dom Lelièvre will have an opportunity to pursue the series that this disc seemed to have launched. Another direction might be a series of Office chants using the newly published
Antiphonale Monasticum
(29:5 and 32:2). The work of the monks is not yet done.
J. F. Weber
