Customer Reviews

Dreams in the Pleasure Garden

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Orlando Consort is Number One in my books - the very best vocal consort recording Renaissance and Medieval music today. Their CDs of John Dunstaple and Antoine Busnois set the gold standard for performance of polyphony. Thus I was quite excited when this recording was reissued. But the disappointment has been proportionate to the expectations.

A fatally flawed performance decision ruins this CD. These ballades, virelais, and rondos - not all merely chansons in a formal sense - are settings by Guillaume de Machaut of his own poetry. Machaut carefully "archived" his own works in a meticulous manuscript, for which reason we have more of his music than of any other 14th C composer. If any composer's 'intentions' should be respected, it is Machaut. Unfortunately, the Orlandos have chosen to sing the text only on one line of the three or four intertwining polyphonic parts. The other lines are vocalized on vowels. Even when sung in excellent tuning by beautiful voices, the result is a lot of hooting and swooping, totally without the rhythmic crunches of consonants that make Machaut lively. I'd be willing to take up a subscription to send the Orlandos back to the recording studio to do it right!

The music on this CD represents the style of composition prevalent in the mid-14th century, the so called ars nova. This style was notable for "hocketing" (i.e. oscillation between short notes and short rests in the upper voices), and even syncopation, but it also included a technique quite different from the ones just mentioned - the so called isorhythm (i.e. regularly repeating rhythmic and harmonic structures). Machaut was a great master of both of these facets of ars nova, but he was by no means the only one, as was demonstrated by a recent Clerks' recording of music from the Ivrea Codex (and if you ask me, the greatest master of isorhythm was John Dunstable). As the in-house reviewer mentions, the music on this disc is more idiosyncratic, less regular, more syncopated than the typical 14-th century musical output. Breaking the rules while perfecting the style has always been a sign of genius, in any age. The Orlando Consort give this music the recording it deserves (I must commend this group for carving out a niche for themselves despite the fact that the idea of having an all-male quartet sing early music so smacks of the Hilliard that it would seem to be a difficult act to follow). The voices blend exquisitely, combining the beauty of tone with an expert technique - even Robert Jones, whose voice I normally find rather harsh, sounds relatively mellow and seductive in this recording. Charles Daniels is great, as always: his solo piece, Liement me deport, is utterly delightful. gkolomietz@yahoo.com