
When I first heard this recording of music mostly from the Buxheimer Orgelbuch, played on a harp, various types of clavisimbalum, violin and occasionally voice by Tasto Solo, my reaction was complete disorientation. Can this be music? They use every trick in the book to make it expressive: ornaments, agogics, voices in complex and sometimes non-supportive relations, colours and timbres. The result is music of such strangeness and complexity, like a Lachenmann quartet. I exaggerate of course, but still.
Now, after several attempts, often abandoned, I think it is the most ravishingly beautiful thing I've ever heard and the greatest music ever written. This is a familiar process for me - I remember going through the same about Ensemble Organum's Machaut.
Anyway, the really interesting thing is to compare what Tasto Solo do with Buxheimer with what Joseph Payne does - Payne uses hardly any tricks, and he plays his faceless modern American organs with restraint, and the result is much more familiar and much more glib. At least that's what I feel when I compare them piece by piece.