Israel Golani: In the Garden of Polyphony
Solaire

Solaire upholds its reputation for distinguished presentation with Israel Golani's In the Garden of Polyphony. The physical release houses its CD within a sturdy slipcase and accompanies it with a fifty-six-page booklet whose contents lend illuminating context to Golani's labour-of-love. Whereas a lengthy article by Tobias Fischer provides insight into the artist and the milieu within which he operates, others focus on the lute's character and its history, and notes by Golani himself prove particularly informative. The illustrations of flowers and birds displayed on the cover and in the booklet complement the music beautifully too, making for one of the label's most attractive presentations to date.

The release's subtitle, French Renaissance Music for Lute & Guitar, grants immediate clarification of the content involved, even if the title references one of the music's defining aspects, its polyphonic character. Recorded over three days in June 2020 at Lutheran Church, Groningen, the sixty-eight-minute collection features Golani on three instruments, two six-course lutes (built in 2018 and 2019) and a four-course Renaissance guitar (made in 2017). The Netherlands-based artist preceded the new release with his debut solo album, Raclerie Universelle, in 2013 and is now regarded as one of Europe's leading lute, baroque guitar, and theorbo players. Tellingly, his original title for the project was Le luth qui chante, which reflects both his love for vocal polyphony and his desire to make the lute ‘sing' as resonantly as the human voice. Consistent with that, the set-list comprises a satisfying mix of chansons, fantasias, and dance pieces by nine sixteenth-century composers.

As noted by John Griffiths in one of the booklet articles, the music the composers wrote is characterized by proportion, symmetry, and balance, and all such qualities are present in the thirty selections on the release. He also clarifies that nearly half of them are arrangements of polyphonic chansons, mainly in four voices, that were originally designed to be sung but became part of the lute repertoire. In his text, Golani states that the project started to evolve in 2018 when he encountered a lute arrangement by Albert de Rippe of the French anonymous chanson for four voices, “Un jour le temps,” and found himself mesmerized by the eloquence of the music. It was at that moment that he set the project in motion by advancing his existing technique so that he could take on the challenges of the material. In assembling the programme, he consulted multiple publications and looked for pieces with compelling harmonic progressions and unusual dissonances. The detail he provides about the distinctions between chansons, fantasias, and dances and the individual compositions does much to enhance one's appreciation for and understanding of the project.

The lute's tone can be tranquility-inducing, and certainly evidence of that is here in Albert de Rippe's “Pleurez mes yeux,” Guillaume Morlaye's “Est il douleur cruelle,” and Pierre Phalèse's “Auprès de vous (Sermisy).” Though multiple patterns are executed concurrently by Golani in a given tapestry, the music nevertheless exudes a serene character, that quality bolstered by the intimacy of the single-performer presentation. That said, not everything is so placid, as shown by Pierre Attaingnant's “Branle gay ‘C'est mon amy',” Adrian Le Roy's “Branles de Bourgogne,” Phalèse's “Branles de Bourgogne,” and Morlaye's “Gaillarde.” Differences in timbre between the guitar and the lute are evident and especially noticeable when a transition occurs between them, but the change is subtle and hardly off-putting.

December 2021