Lassus completed his swan-song days before his death on June 14th, 1594. The decision to set 20 stanzas from Luigi Tansillo's unfinished meditation on ''the tears of St Peter'' must have been a highly personal one. The poet's portrayal of a man driven nearly insane with remorse allowed Lassus to exorcise the mental illness that engulfed him in his last years. The result is perhaps his most moving work, for there is in these madrigali spirituali a sense of distilled mannerism that calls to mind the understated passion of late-period Brahms.
These two highly accomplished recordings could not be more different. The Huelgas Ensemble distribute the work's seven voices among nine singers and as many instrumentalists (including a continuo-player), taking their cue from the pictures of musicians of the Bavarian ducal chapel shown under Lassus's direction. The scoring varies from movement to movement, from purely vocal through colla parte doubling, with nearly every shade in between (as a unifying device, the first and last stanzas are played twice, the first time with instruments only).
The blend of voices and instruments is opulent and flattering to the ear; but not all the individual scorings are equally effective, and the variety itself (though necessary) slightly undermines the unity of the whole. None the less, Paul van Nevel's conception of the Lagrime as the monumental summation of a life's work is lovingly rendered, and there is much to admire in the vocal warmth and the instrumental polish of this performance. Van Nevel's lengthy introductory essay is characteristically authoritative; the transposition used for the sections scored in chiavette (down a fifth, as also used by Herreweghe) is perhaps open to debate, though undeniably effective.
Monumental too, but in stature as well as style, is the reading offered by the seven singers of the Ensemble Vocal Europeen. Philippe Herreweghe captures the detached expression of pain that makes this music so haunting. This is partly a matter of vocal timbre: individually the singers' tone is a shade cooler than that of the Huelgas Ensemble's members, but collectively they sound every bit as full-bodied as their rivals (listen to Peter's superb dismissal of life, ''Vattene vita va'' in stanza 15).
However, it is in their interpretative acuteness that Herreweghe's singers gain a decisive edge. This is best illustrated by the groups' differing approaches to rubato: van Nevel uses accelerandos or straightforward shifts (usually to emphasize a textual illustration), but Herreweghe ever so slightly stretches the pulse when the voices achieve a poignant inflexion or come to a standstill (for example at Christ's crushing words ''amico disleal, discepol fiero'' in the fourth stanza, or at ''la vergogna e la pietade'' in the first stanza). Such moments acquire an intensity that clearly identifies them as the key moments in a psychological drama, making the cycle as a whole compulsive listening. This is not to understate the many virtues of van Nevel's approach, but simply to say that Herreweghe's singers achieve something very, very special indeed.'