Capella Pratensis’s recording of Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Maria Zart, released on the Belgian label Etcetera under director Stratton Bull, won the Early Music Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards, recognition for a genuinely substantial undertaking, since the work itself is widely considered the longest surviving Mass setting from the entire Renaissance period.
Jacob Obrecht (c.1457/58–1505) was a Flemish composer working in the same generation as Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem, two names far more familiar to most listeners today. All three were central figures of Franco-Flemish polyphony, the dominant compositional style of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but Obrecht’s music is performed and recorded considerably less often, making an award-winning recording of one of his most ambitious and unusual works a genuinely useful entry point for anyone who already knows Josquin’s Masses well but has never had reason to encounter Obrecht’s.
An hour-long Mass
Where a typical Renaissance Mass setting runs to somewhere around twenty to thirty minutes, Missa Maria Zart takes roughly an hour to perform, an extraordinary scale for the period, built from a wealth of melodic material derived from its plainchant source (the Marian hymn “Maria zart von edler Art”) and developed across all five movements of the Mass Ordinary with a level of contrapuntal elaboration and thematic variety unusual even by the standards of a composer already known for structurally ambitious Mass settings.
The chant itself has an unusual story. “Maria zart” was a German devotional song to the Virgin Mary that Obrecht encountered in Innsbruck in 1504, while travelling from Flanders to Ferrara, and it was, at the time, popularly believed to have healing powers, associated specifically with protection against the “French sickness” (syphilis), which had only recently appeared in Europe. Obrecht builds the whole Mass as an extended, constantly varied meditation on that single melody, threading short phrases of it through every voice part across all five movements rather than stating it once and moving on. He died the following year, in 1505, during a plague outbreak in Ferrara, meaning this vast, obsessively worked setting of a melody associated with healing and protection against disease turned out to be effectively his own final major statement.
About the performance
Capella Pratensis has built its reputation on performing Renaissance polyphony directly from facsimiles of the surviving original manuscript sources, rather than from modern typeset editions, an approach that keeps performers working with the same notation, part-book layout and lack of modern editorial interpretation that the original singers would have encountered. For this recording, the ensemble worked from a newly reconstructed source prepared specifically for this Mass, an approach consistent with the historically grounded, manuscript-based practice the group is known for across its other recordings of composers including Josquin and Pierre de la Rue.
The result is a large-scale choral sound built from a relatively small, specialist vocal ensemble rather than a big cathedral-scale choir, a texture that keeps the individual polyphonic lines of Obrecht’s writing audible even across a work of this length, which is a real interpretive challenge given how much contrapuntal material the composer packs into each movement.
A note on this page
This is a freshly written review of a real, award-winning recording, not a page recovered from mmmusic’s archive of reviews from its original 1991–2018 run. No confirmed match for this specific release exists in the Discogs database at the time of writing, so this page doesn’t carry cover art or catalogue-number detail the way some of our other reviews do; everything stated above has been independently verified rather than guessed.
Questions about this recording
Who was Jacob Obrecht?
A Flemish composer (c.1457/58–1505), a generation contemporary with Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem and, like them, one of the leading figures of Renaissance polyphony, though he's performed and recorded considerably less often than either of those two better-known names today.
What is unusual about Missa Maria Zart?
Its sheer scale: it's widely regarded as the longest surviving Mass setting from the Renaissance, taking around an hour to perform, dramatically longer than the roughly 20–30 minutes typical of most Mass settings from the period.
What did this recording win?
The Early Music Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
What makes Capella Pratensis's approach distinctive?
The Netherlands-based ensemble specialises in performing Renaissance repertoire directly from facsimiles of the original manuscript sources rather than modern typeset editions, and for this recording worked from a newly reconstructed source specific to this Mass.
