Review Summary: The first movement of a seventeenth century play, presented meticulously by a group of modern day musicians, turns out to be at least as interesting as the concept suggests, and while not entirely flawless, perhaps something to love if you take the time w
When you settle down to listen to this, you're not really listening to an album. In only the most peripheral sense is this an album. What you're really preparing to listen to is, albeit presented aurally, a play.
Based on Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel's 17th century work, Dutch collective H.E.R.R. combine his text with their own music to produce something exhiliratingly new to a jaded music fan. The music should be described first, as I'm aware that "Other" does little to catch the eye or inform the reader. If it had to be named, 'neoclassical' would likely be the tag it was given. Practically every sound here is something that would be heard in a Renaissance court or opera house;harpsichord-like instruments, various percussion, flute, piano, cello, acoustic guitar. This relatively sparse selection of instrumentation, most of it played all by one man (Michiel Spape), creates a consistently appropriate, rich, unobtrusive but interesting backdrop to Vondel's words for the full seventy-six minutes of the disc. Ill-versed though I am in 17th century theatre-house musics, the fact that it plays almost unbroken for well over an hour, changing unjarringly to fit the mood of whichever scene is currently playing, without becoming boring, annoying or tiring is quite the feat. At first it sounded odd, to hear music I associated with poor television documentaries from school presented seriously, but by the end of the first listen you should at least be won over by the care and elegance of the compositions here.
Now to the really interesting bit; the story itself. As you may have supposed, given the title, the story's focus is religious; the Lucifer of the title is the Lucifer of the Bible (hopefully you won't dismiss it out of hand on account of its Biblical theme; my own beliefs don't accord with the Bible). Your cast is therefore amongst the best imaginable. Those named include our protagonist Lucifer, God's Stadtholder in Heaven; we also have Apollyon and Belzebub, two lesser angels who initially confer with Lucifer; Belial, whom the three approach to test the waters; Gabriel, the Herald and interpreter, and Michael, God's unresting watcher and Field Marshal.
The story in this, the first movement of Vondel's play, is little short of excellent throughout. Being only the first movement, the story is not ended by the end of the disc; when "Den Standert Lucifers" fades, no angel has yet struck a blow against another, and yet the preceding seventy-six minutes have had no shortage of drama. This should not be surprising; this is after all the story of Lucifer's fall. In a sense, the clash between his and Michael's forces (presumably to come in H.E.R.R.'s next release), which everyone - myself included - would assume to be 'the exciting bit', is practically a post-script. Lucifer's fall is like a good magic trick; it's done long before you realise something has happened.
As such, much of this first movement consists of relative inactivities such as meetings, thoughts, observations and discussions, but tension and drama is maintained throughout (the music rising admirably to the challenge of the story), so well that I really don't mind it being 'incomplete'.
However, this album does have flaws, and I'm aware that my review so far is also likely to have created some preconceived flaws in your mind. To the latter: I imagine, with the neoclassical music, high-strung concept and so on, words like "bombastic", "pompous" and "pretentious". Incredibly I don't think it is any of these things. The music is bombastic only when the characters are bombastic; when Lucifer declares "That shall I thwart, if in my power it be", or "To be the first Prince in some lower court is better than within the Blessed Light to be the second", the percussion steps up with a martial drumming pattern, making the backdrop sound grand and imposing. But equally, when a non-character strophe/antistrophe muses on some aspect of God, the music is subdued and practically unnoticeable, letting the vocalists do the work. Similarly, there are no operatic vocals here; no desperately checking the lyrics to see what the hell that loud man just wailed. The vast majority of spoken in cadence, with only occasional lines or maybe a chorus (literally, that is: a choir of angels) being half-sung.
As for pretension, I just don't think there is any, remarkably. The choice of a seventeenth century Dutch playwright's largely-unknown-to-the-public play seems aimed at the kind of "look how learned we are", but these are my words in my review; not something branded across the back of the album case. More importantly, H.E.R.R. are forever story-tellers, and never preachers. There is no message except any that you might take away from Lucifer's story yourself; no imperative to a belief or opinion, just the straight telling of a tale.
But there are flaws. Foremost, this is just simply a hefty piece of work. Written (that is, adapted from the translation of Vondel) and composed over a two year period, coming in at a little over seventy-six minutes long and with a rather thick booklet covered in great amounts of text (the words/lyrics), it's not something that can be listened to lightly, not to mention the metaphorical weight of the subject matter. Having it on as background music is certainly an option, but then you're only really listening to the music and letting the words (which are legion) wash over you. If you want to read along in the booklet as you listen - as an opera fan of the seventeenth century would read along with her libretta - you can't even really do anything else at the same time, given that the lyrics are almost non-stop throughout; there are brief pauses, but rarely of more than a several seconds. So setting aside a good chunk of an afternoon is the direction you're pushed in. Also, there are no sing-along choruses, no solos, no bridges; the whole thing is something else entirely, and it's a little disconcerting at first. Only peripherally an album, remember?
On a more direct, aesthetic note, while the music is consistently precise and so on, there a couple of issues with voice. The majority of H.E.R.R. are Dutch, and some have a better grasp of English than others. Hearing "lineage" pronounced as "line-edge" (as opposed to linny-edge) can knock your concentration, for example. Also, the prelude and the voice of Apollyon are done by the only (so far as I can tell) non-Dutch member of the band, an Englishman. While he naturally has no problems with pronunciation, he sounds so wide-eyed and fresh-faced that for a moment I thought I was listening to an unusually dark Jackanory. I've gotten used to him since then, to the point that he seems almost appropriate, but he nearly ruined it for me at the start.
So for now this gets a cautious 4/5. I'm coming to love it more and more with each listen - and am certainly looking forward to a conclusion to the story with future release(s) - but this is really
such an oddity, with so little precedent to go on, that I can't help but easily imagine someone thinking it's pointless or boring, or even annoying. From my camp though, it's coming with the highest of recommendations.
