The delicate art of reconstructing a Renaissance Mass

As well as attending sessions for a recording of Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella, Edward Breen learns from Fabrice Fitch about the fascinating process of reconstructing an incomplete Renaissance work

Fabrice Fitch & Andrew Kirkman (photography: Guy Verstraete)

Last October, I found myself making a strange pilgrimage through an industrial estate in search of a rock music studio, the venue for a recording of Obrecht’s Missa Scaramella. Many will know Scaramella as set by either Josquin or Compère; it’s a delightful Italian satirical song about a soldier preparing for war, an earworm full of lively nonsense words – the early music foreshadowing of ‘Non più andrai’, if you like. Frustratingly, the Mass that Obrecht based on this song survives incomplete, with two of the four voice parts completely missing from the surviving set of partbooks in the Biblioteka Jagiello´nska, Kraków, and so for this recording they have been reconstructed by my Gramophone colleague Fabrice Fitch. The ensemble is The Binchois Consort, founded and conducted by Andrew Kirkman (pictured above, with Fitch). The ensemble’s longtime resident scholar and friend Philip Weller was part of this particular project when it began. [...]

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