The Early Music Club (EMC)

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chasmaniac

The Medieval Romantics, Gothic Voices

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QuoteWhen this was first issued (15:4), we had been getting Ars Subtilior music on records with some frequency. This period between Machaut and Dufay (about 1380 to 1420) had always been characterized by the fiendishly difficult notation of the sources. It seemed that notation, which had until that time been used to record musical sounds, was becoming the starting point for a composer, who began with notation on the page and left it to performers to execute what they read. It seemed possible that notation could even indicate what the voice could not execute, at least until a new level of performing mastery was achieved. Page, however, avoided this paradox by starting with the music rather than the notation, settling on Romanticism as the characteristic ideal that defines the efforts of any composers to expand their resources. To clarify his point, he widens the time period to 1340–1440, incorporating late Machaut and early Dufay for contrast. He is also frank about the ongoing issues of text underlay and use of instruments that had exercised performers and scholars for over a decade before that. He explains his approach clearly and convincingly, rejecting accompaniment and the texting of untexted vocal lines in favor of vocalizing them. Page's notes have been slightly abbreviated and shorn of footnotes.

Solage is underrepresented here with only one piece, Joieux de cuer, as is Jacob de Senleches with En ce gracieux temps joli, but covering the principal Ars Subtilior composers was not the main focus here. Margaret Philpot's solo Comment qu'a moy of Machaut is ideal, still unsurpassed today. J. de Porta's Alma polis religio/Axe poli cum artica, probably a first recording, is still the best, since duplicated only by La Reverdie (17:5) and Obsidienne (on Calliope), which both use instruments. Gilet Velut, one of the more obscure composers of the lot, is represented by Je voel servir, not recorded elsewhere, although three other pieces are found on four other discs, two of them duplicated. Johannes de Lymburgia is better known than that, for his Salve virgo is on four recordings, two of them with an additional piece, and another motet like this one is on a later Gothic Voices disc.

This is a significant disc, although it is hard not to say that about most of the score of recordings that the group made for Hyperion before Page went to Academe. The program unfolds intelligently, the music is entrancing at best (as the Machaut virelai), and the singing is ravishing. New collectors who were not around for the initial release of the series will have the benefit of the lower price when most (if not all) have been reissued. Those of us who have the originals will be satisfied that we heard them when they first blazed a new trail of performance practice. Go for it.

FANFARE: J. F. Weber

QuoteThere is a famous book which interprets the fourteenth century as the time when the Middle Ages finally went to seed like the crops in Autumn. Another describes it as 'the calamitous fourteenth century'. Small wonder, therefore, if the music composed in France during the century of Guillaume de Machaut (d1377) has often been described as 'mannerist' and 'precious': terms that suggest decadence and escapism.

The performances recorded here spring from a different view of French music during the fourteenth century, for we believe that French song of the later Ars Nova can be described by a term that is both positive and evocative: Romantic. To be sure, these songs have been called Romantic before, but it may still seem rash to speak of 'The Medieval Romantics'. Devotees of nineteenth-century music will object that there was no cult of genius in the fourteenth century, no passion for the wildness of Nature and no such nationalism as we associate with the 1800s. And yet if Romanticism implies a taste for beauty touched by strangeness, and if it is associated with a desire to expand the resources of musical language (and especially of harmony) with sheer profligacy of invention, then the second half of the fourteenth century in France was truly a period of Romantic composition.

This is not to say that every composer of the period was a Romantic artist. Most of the polyphonic songs produced in France between c1340 and c1400 are light and melodious, being neither 'wayward' (a term often used of this repertory) nor Romantic. The virelai Mais qu'il vous viengne a plaisance is a representative example of this style at its best. Nonetheless, in addition to these plainer songs we find others, many of them attributed to named composers, which reveal different priorities.

With the Romanticism of the fourteenth century—as with that of the nineteenth—a major priority is the sheer scale of what is attempted. To hear a thirteenth-century motet such as Quant voi le douz tans/En Mai/[Immo]LATUS, followed immediately by the four-part motet Alma polis religio/Axe poli/Tenor/Contratenor of the next century, is to sense that there has been a great expansion in the musical territory colonized for composition. The later work is longer, its harmonic language more studied but also more diversified, and its compass much wider (reaching two octaves, the limit of the human voice according to contemporary theorists). With its complex isorhythmic scheme, it is altogether a more grandiose and intellectually ambitious work than its thirteenth-century counterpart.

In the chanson repertoire of rondeaux, virelais and ballades, where the Romanticism of the later Ars Nova is principally to be found, the desire for expansive musical conceptions was closely allied (as it was to be five hundred years later) to an enlarged conception of melody. As early as the twelfth century, of course, some monophonic songs of the trouvères (not to mention some Latin songs) had been supplied with expansive, melismatic melodies, but the desire to stretch a long, measured melody over a large polyphonic frame was new in the fourteenth century. Among French composers of the Ars Nova this produced compositions going far beyond what could be accomplished in a thirteenth-century piece such as the motet just mentioned, Quant voi le douz tans/En Mai/[Immo]LATUS. In that piece, as it is performed on this recording, we hear first a monophonic song with its roots in the trouvère tradition, and then the same song as it was given mensural rhythm and placed above a vocalized tenor to make a motet, perhaps around 1240. As far as we can discern—for the origins of the polyphonic chanson in the fourteenth century are still obscure—this is one of the textures which passed to the fourteenth century and which helped to form the basis of chansons such as Guillaume de Machaut's Tant doucement me sens emprisonnes, here performed as a duet comprising the Cantus and (vocalized) Tenor to display the mastery of Machaut's two-part technique. The comparison with the thirteenth-century motet shows that the musical scope of Machaut's piece is much greater than the Triplum–Tenor duet of the motet, largely because Machaut's Cantus is so vast and needs so little support from the text. The thirteenth-century composer works syllable by syllable, but Machaut's melismatic melody is directed, in particular, by a rhythmic elasticity which is entirely new to the fourteenth century and which merits comparison with some of the freedoms that were also 'new' in the nineteenth.

We hear this freedom again in the highly flexible melodic line of the anonymous virelai Je languis d'amere mort, or in the Cantus of Paolo da Firenze's Sofrir m'estuet et plus non puis durer. Paolo's piece demonstrates that the supposedly wayward rhythms of fourteenth-century song can be lyrical, even lilting, in their effect upon the ear, however strange they may look to the eye. In a similar way, the phrase-lengths in the Cantus of Quiconques veut d'amors joïr, a superb piece by an anonymous master, are so supple that they resist 'the tyranny of the bar line' at every turn.

There were many experiments with harmony among the medieval Romantics. As we leave the thirteenth century and enter the fourteenth century we become more confident that unusual harmonic effects may be tokens of a colouristic interest in harmony rather than the by-products of a compositional method. That kind of interest in harmony could coexist with the cerebral and calculating tendencies of all medieval composing, and indeed it could be advanced by them. The composer of Alma polis religio/Axe poli/Tenor/Contratenor, for example, is fascinated by a chord of Bb–G–D–G, and he exploits his isorhythmic scheme in such a way that the top three notes sound alone—so that the ear processes a simple chord of G—and then the low B flat enters in the Contratenor to tint the sonority in a most unexpected way. Many other examples could be cited from the pieces recorded here, but the master in this art is Solage, a composer who has left only ten securely attributed works, all of them experimental in various ways, and a high proportion of them in four parts (relatively rare in the chanson repertoire of the Ars Nova). His virelai Joieux de cuer en seumellant estoye, in four parts, is perhaps the summit of fourteenth-century Romanticism. The Cantus—the only part bearing the text—is a vast melody both in terms of its length and its width; it regularly spans a tenth or an eleventh within a few measures, a distance acknowledged by fourteenth-century theorists such as Jacques de Liège to represent the workable (if not the absolute) limit of the human voice. The other three parts are highly vocal in character, or in contemporary terminology, dicibilis (literally 'pronouncable'). It is the essence of Solage's achievement in this piece that the textless parts seem to strain towards the beauty and sufficiency of Cantus-style melody.

What signs are there that medieval composers recognized that the later fourteenth century had produced composers of profligate inventiveness—musicians who had lent a touch of strangeness to beauty? The surest indication that composers of the fifteenth century recognized that something very striking had happened in the recent past is to be found in the kinds of pieces that they chose to produce themselves. The highly controlled scale and harmonic language of chansons such as Dufay's Je requier a tous amoureux, the same composer's Las, que feray? Ne que je devenray? or Gilet Velut's Je voel servir plus c'onques mais, are characteristic of much early fifteenth-century secular music and may be interpreted as a reaction against the luxuriance of later fourteenth-century composers such as Solage. When we turn to a mature composition of the mid-1430s, Johannes de Lymburgia's Tota pulcra es, amica mea, we find a four-part technique completely unlike that of Solage. Lymburgia's harmony is rigorously controlled so that almost every vertical sonority is a consonance, thirds and sixths are crucial building blocks of the music and fleeting rests are inserted in the texture to avoid dissonant colours that the 'Medieval Romantics' would have prized.

Christopher Page © 1991
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

chasmaniac

The Study of Love: French Songs & Motets of the 14th Century, Gothic Voices

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QuoteThis recording completes a three-part series featuring the songs and motets of the French Ars Nova, initiated by The Medieval Romantics (Helios CDH55293), and continued by Lancaster and Valois (Helios CDH55294). The title of this third recording is the most pertinent of all, for the poets and composers of fourteenth-century France did indeed regard love as a study. Our cover illustration is a reminder that the narrative poets of the period often present themselves as retiring individuals who have learned all they know of love from books. When the poet of La grant biauté speaks of 'Nature', for example, he uses a personification enriched by several centuries of thought and imagination in both Latin and vernacular (Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles provides a fine example in Middle English), while figures such as 'Envie', 'Desir' and 'Amours', ubiquitous in these poems, evoke the tradition of the narrative romances whose authors were expected to share their knowledge of Biblical and classical story with their readers. If the scholar shown on our cover were not St Jerome, one might imagine him to be a poet checking his knowledge of Marticius (for Marticius qui fu), the basilisk (for Le basile), Euclid and Pygmalion (for Fist on, dame) or the labyrinth that Daedalus made for Minos (for En la maison Dedalus).

The musical resources displayed in these pieces are extensive. Puis que l'aloe ne fine has the kind of sinuous melody, with musical phrases of unpredictable length and momentary flashes of musica ficta colour, that French composers of the Ars Nova always loved; we find similar qualities in La grant biauté, Combien que j'aye and Renouveler me feïst, this last being one of the earliest 'New Year' songs in the repertory. Several pieces in four parts, particularly the anonymous Jour a jour (a popular work to judge by the number of surviving copies) and Le basile, by Solage, reveal the desire for sweet and consonant harmony, occasionally embittered by moments of dissonance, which characterizes a good deal of fourteenth-century French writing in four parts. Particularly striking, perhaps, are the two pieces in the 'B flat' tonality (that is to say with a double flat signature) that was especially favoured by composers in the decades around 1400. Of these two songs, Marticius qui fu and Fist on, dame, the first owes something to the mature style of Machaut in the rhythmic gestures of its texted voice. Both are robust compositions with almost swaggering melodies.

Guillaume de Machaut is featured on all three recordings of this series. Trop plus / Biauté paree / Je ne suis is a three-part motet that welcomes a very sprightly performance. Many years ago, David Munrow recorded the piece at a very slow tempo; this brings out the dissonances but may sometimes deprive the cross-rhythms and fragmented musical phrases of their excitement. Dame, je vueil endurer and Se mesdisans are drawn from Machaut's collection of monophonic virelais, a variety of music which only Machaut chose to produce and notate in the fourteenth century and which invariably, as here, reveals his distinctive musical voice. In a similar way, Tres bonne et belle could not be the work of any other Ars Nova composer; its palette of dissonant colours, with prominent fourths and sevenths, seems distinctively Mascaudian.

Il me convient guerpir is one of the latest pieces. Probably dating from the early fifteenth century, it is a distinguished member of a small group of songs composed for two equal voices. Finally, there is the Gloria by Pycard. It belongs here in that Pycard was apparently a Frenchman, although his music is only known from the English Old Hall Manuscript, and his rhythmic intricacies recall the French Ars subtilior. In rhythmic terms, this Gloria is one of the most complex mass compositions in the entire medieval repertory; at times, the upper voices travel so far away from the basic tactus or 'beat', and the lower voices, holding sustained notes, do so little to assert it, that all sense of metrical organization is lost. I hope that the pieces by Pycard recorded for this series will help to establish the reputation of this extraordinary artist as one of the leading composers of his generation.

Christopher Page © 1992
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

Coopmv

The third of the Obsidian releases arrrived today and I hope to give the twofer a good first listen over this 4-day weekend ...


Coopmv

Here is another one that has been sitting around a bit long which I hope to have a first listen this weekend ...


Coopmv

This 3-CD set arrived yesterday and is a wonderful addition to my ever expanding early music collection ...


Que

Quote from: chasmaniac on February 10, 2012, 02:24:32 AM
Guillaume de Machaut, Messe de Nostre Dame, by Diabolus in Musica

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Anyone able to make a brief comparison between this and the recordings that I have, by Ensemble Gilles Binchois (Harmonic/Cantus) and Ensemble Organum (HM)? :) And then there is the new recording by Ensemble Musica Nova (Aeon)- there are too many! :o :)

Q

chasmaniac

Quote from: ~ Que ~ on February 17, 2012, 11:44:15 PM
Anyone able to make a brief comparison between this and the recordings that I have, by Ensemble Gilles Binchois (Harmonic/Cantus) and Ensemble Organum (HM)? :) And then there is the new recording by Ensemble Musica Nova (Aeon)- there are too many! :o :)

Q

I wish I could say something useful here, Que, but I don't think I can. The Organum recording I don't know, but there are 5 I do know.

Vellard and Diabolus provide a musical/liturgical context. The Hilliards, Musica Nova and the Orlandos do not, but present it as is. Even for its time, the Messe is a strange, dark work. I think it benefits, then, from clearer, more muscular treatments. Vellard, the Orlandos and Diabolus come closest to this. The Hilliards, as usual, are too measured and reverberant, and I'm afraid Musica Nova follows that path. The Orlandos disc has the great benefit of juxtaposing Machaut with modern work by O'Regan and Bryar here:

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If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

Coopmv

Quote from: ~ Que ~ on February 17, 2012, 11:44:15 PM
Anyone able to make a brief comparison between this and the recordings that I have, by Ensemble Gilles Binchois (Harmonic/Cantus) and Ensemble Organum (HM)? :) And then there is the new recording by Ensemble Musica Nova (Aeon)- there are too many! :o :)

Q

Q,  Unfortunately, we have opened this Pandora's box called early music ...   :o

Bogey



Starting the day with gorgeous voices.
There will never be another era like the Golden Age of Hollywood.  We didn't know how to blow up buildings then so we had no choice but to tell great stories with great characters.-Ben Mankiewicz

chasmaniac

Guillaume Dufay, Flos Florum: Motets, Hymnes, Antiennes, Ensemble Musica Nova

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QuoteStudents and others who set themselves to the task of understanding the initially elusive musical language of the Renaissance often learn about Dufay and the cantus firmus -- the preexisting chant or song around which a mass was built -- and about his mathematically dizzying isorhythmic motet Nuper rosarum flores. The more intimate sacred motet, directly expressive of its text, seems to be more the province of Josquin Desprez, two generations later; Dufay's motets, many of which address Mary, are rather tough going for the newcomer. They are not closely tied to the text like the motets of Josquin, and even those that have a cantus firmus don't feature it as an obvious unifying device the way Dufay's masses do.

This superb French disc is the one that clarifies what Dufay's motets are all about. This may not knock Beethoven and Andrea Bocelli off the top of the classical charts, but anyone with an interest in the rather arcane musical language of the early Flemish-Italian Renaissance, or even in the art of the period, should add this disc to his or her library. The Ensemble Musica Nova strives for absolute clarity of texture. It sings a cappella (as Dufay himself is thought to have preferred), with text added to the untexted lower parts for greater intelligibility. The group sings precisely but in a relaxed fashion that gets across the crucial sense of when a line of the polyphony is being ornamented by the composer -- the sense of expression in Dufay's music is very much bound up with ornament and rhythm, which most performances don't communicate very well. The "flowers" referred to in the texts -- Mary, the city of Florence -- seem almost to burst from the music, which may seem remarkable to anyone who has sat through a lot of dull Dufay performances, but sample the first or the third track. (English text translations in the booklet do not, unfortunately, run parallel with the Latin and French, but follow them at the end.) The booklet notes are rather dense, not always smoothly translated ("to sing of death enabled musicians and poets to suggest a filiation"?) and confusingly divided into two separate essays, one dealing with the allusive quality of Dufay's texts and the other delving into musical structure and into what Dufay's audiences would have listened for in the two types of motets represented here, the motet with cantus firmus and the freely composed "song motet." The notes may be a hard slog for those without some previous knowledge of the subject, but effort expended in understanding them will bring these pieces alive and deepen the listener's perception of Dufay as the composer, perhaps more than any other, who lay right at the emergence of the idea of individual musical expression that is taken for granted today. The disc can also be appreciated for its sensuous surfaces alone, and Mornant church where the music was recorded could not have been more appropriate to the performers' aims. An essential choice for libraries -- the disc really furnishes enough material for an upper-level or graduate class all by itself -- or for Renaissance collections.
--allmusic
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

chasmaniac

Guillaume Dufay, Mille Bonjours!, Diabolus in Musica

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QuoteDufay, writing in fifteenth century, is a figure of greater variety (and much greater profundity, for that matter) than is often realized. Attracting an enormous following and widespread admiration in Europe throughout his long lifetime, he wrote primarily for the church: Dufay was an ordained priest. But he used many forms – from elaborate and florid polyphonic masses to simple songs. And secular songs at that: over 80 survive which may in part or whole be safely attributed to the composer. If it is possible to generalize, one would say that Dufay's earlier songs were more extrovert, happier, upbeat, than those composed before the trials his life brought him; the later works tend to be reflective, morose even.

These songs generally date from two distinct periods in Dufay's life... from his late teens in 1414, 1415 on his leaving Cambrai to travel to various European courts, where he would have heard a variety of styles from England and Italy as well as France; this lasted until 1439, when Dufay returned to Cambrai. Duties at the Burgundian court and the cathedral virtually precluded any but liturgical compositions – until after Dufay's move, after 1451, to the court of Duke Louis and Duchess Anne of Savoy, whom we know to have been lively patrons of also the kind of secular music, the chansons by Dufay, some of which form the substance of this atmospheric, well-performed and appropriately-contextualized CD from Diabolus in Musica.

The majority of Dufay's output of this kind is rondeaux (with some ballades) for three (some for four) voices. The rest mostly follow such established structures as the ballade, bergerette/virelai and the like. Two tenors take the parts of the fundamental voice part (tenor), superius with the main text line; and a high voice the contratenor for additional color. These are taken by Raphaël Boulay (tenor), Frédéric Betous and Andrès Rojas-Urrego (altos) and Aïno Lund-Lavoipierre (soprano). They sing with unfussed enthusiasm, sweetness and an accurate and expressive articulation that seems to come from within the music's spirit, rather than gliding along the top of the melody as has happened with some recent Dufay recordings. This is highly effective. Nor – whatever your reservations about accompaniment – are the clavicytherium (an early spinet with as much hammer noise as sweet key sounds), gittern (plucked strings) and vièle (medieval fiddle) intrusive or superfluous. Their euphonic, low key adds a mellow tinge to the singing. It's worth noting that Guerber, the author of the essay in the accompanying booklet, disputes the work of recent musicologists and suggests that there is little or no evidence for an a cappella (unaccompanied) performing tradition, and cites Patterns in Play (by Graeme Boone) in support of what will be a somewhat controversial conclusion.

Technically what Dufay does to develop the achievements of the earlier and by now defunct Ars Subtilior is remarkable. Not only because of the inventiveness of theme, texture and melody; but also in terms of contrapuntal rhythm, the beauty of the effects and the fitness of music to words.

Those texts were almost all in the French of his day (only a handful were in Italian); although there are settings of Petrarch, Le Rousselet and Perinet etc, it is probable that Dufay wrote much of his own poetry.

The recording is a nice, close and intimate one with perfect balance between singers and the four instrumentalists playing here. The text of all the songs is printed in French and English in a useful, glossy booklet in the Alpha 'digipak' with candid photographs of the performances and performers. Guerber makes some interesting speculations on just who would have performed such songs as these and suggests that those retained for sacred music were unlikely also to have worked on the songs we hear on this CD. Less because of any distinction between the sobriety of the one and the freer and easier often dance-inspired ways of the other, than between the type of skills and traditions on which each broad genre was based.

So, if this is repertoire which in any way interests you, here is a first class introduction. If you're already persuaded of Dufay's greatness, you'll want to extend your exposure to his secular music. If medieval song performed exquisitely and idiomatically in unpretentious and direct manner, then do not hesitate to buy this CD. Thoroughly recommended.

Copyright © 2008, Mark Sealey

And this from the inimitable Bruno:

QuoteWithout a moment's doubt, I can say that this is the best-performed CD of Dufay's secular chansons that I've ever heard, with 19 of those supremely sophisticated miniature masterpieces assembled in a concert progress from love-sickness to joie-de-vivre. This recording is a perfect companion to Diabolus in Musica's CD of Dufay's most memorable mass, Missa Se La Face Ay Pale (which I've reviewed previously. Wonder of wonders, the chanson Se La Face Ay Pale is included on this disk, in an elaborated "keyboard" setting from a tablature manuscript, played on an instrument that worked somewhat like a harpsichord and sounds rather like a harp on energy drinks. The singers have to share glory in this performance with some extraordinarily skillful playing of late Medieval instruments: vielle (fiddle) and Burgundian harp especially. But there's plenty of glory to be shared.

The name of this ensemble - Diabolus in Musica - would probably get this CD banned from certain libraries in Alaska, but actually the term refers to the interval of the tritone (the augmented fourth) which either in chords or in scale passages caused innumerable headaches for polyphonists, always sounding "wrong' to their ears. The solution involved something called "musica ficta", the addition of a sharp or a flat to avoid the tritone. Such ficta were seldom notated; the performer was expected to recognize the need and to know the rules. Rest assured that Ensemble Diabolus in Musica is totally avoidant of devilish dissonances.

The secular chanson repertoire, from Machaut to Dufay, is the prime glory of Medieval music, as pre-eminent as the madrigal in the late Renaissance or the polka at a Minnesota family reunion.
If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

The new erato

I need Bruno to recommend me some polka CDs.

chasmaniac

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

chasmaniac

I apologize in advance for its unavailability, but this recording of (what I take to be) obscure German music of the pre-Baroque era is perfectly gorgeous, and deserved a better fate than to be quickly and completely forgotten upon release, "dropped stillborn from the press", in Hume's piquant mot. You might find it on BRO - I did.

Ich rühm dich Heidelberg, I Ciarlatani

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If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

Coopmv

Quote from: Bogey on February 21, 2012, 02:29:24 AM


Starting the day with gorgeous voices.

Bill,  I have this CD in my collection.  It is excellent IMO ...

Bogey

Quote from: Coopmv on February 22, 2012, 05:08:26 PM
Bill,  I have this CD in my collection.  It is excellent IMO ...

The A4 cds are some of my favorite, Stuart.
There will never be another era like the Golden Age of Hollywood.  We didn't know how to blow up buildings then so we had no choice but to tell great stories with great characters.-Ben Mankiewicz

chasmaniac

One of my all-time favourites of any stripe,

The Mirror of Narcissus: Songs by Guillaume de Machaut, Gothic Voices

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If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."  --Wittgenstein, PI §217

Bogey

Now listening:

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An oldie, but a goodie.
There will never be another era like the Golden Age of Hollywood.  We didn't know how to blow up buildings then so we had no choice but to tell great stories with great characters.-Ben Mankiewicz

Coopmv

Quote from: Bogey on March 03, 2012, 08:00:06 AM
Now listening:

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An oldie, but a goodie.

Any works by David Munrow on this twofer?  I bought the following twofer a few weeks ago and it is wonderful ...


kishnevi

#399
Quote from: Coopmv on March 03, 2012, 06:04:23 PM
Any works by David Munrow on this twofer?  I bought the following twofer a few weeks ago and it is wonderful ...



Two different groups, two different time periods.   There's about (speaking very roughly) a three hundred year gap between the music on the Munrow disc and the music on the Tallis Scholars disc.  [ETA: the Philips duo is composed solely of performances by the Tallis Scholars, including their nearly divine performance of Spem in Alium.   SiA and most of the other performances have been issued again (and sometimes again and again) on their own label, Gimell.]

The Tallis Scholars recording was both my introduction to Renassiance music and the start of my infatuation with the Tallis Scholars.

The Munrow recording is also another classic performance, although I rarely listen to it, as music from that era appeals to me much less than music from the later Middle Ages/Renaissance.