The Rose, the Lily & the Whortleberry (Medieval Gardens in Music) - Orlando Consort [Import]

Donald Greig (Performer), Guillaume de Machaut (Composer), Codex Bamberg Anonymous (Composer), French Anonymous (Composer), Jean Robert Trebor (Composer), English Anonymous (Composer), Walter Frye (Composer), Leonel Power (Composer), Alexander Agricola (Composer), Spanish Anonymous (Composer), Juan [1] Vasquez (Composer), Rodrigo de Ceballos (Composer), Gabriel Mena (Composer), Francisco Guerrero (Composer), Claudin de Sermisy (Composer), Antoine Brumel (Composer), Johannes Lupi (Composer), Carpentras (Elzear Genet) (Composer), Cipriano de Rore (Composer), Jacques Arcadelt (Composer), Orlando Consort (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Donald Greig
• Composer: Guillaume de Machaut, Codex Bamberg Anonymous, French Anonymous, Jean Robert Trebor, English Anonymous, et al.
• Audio CD (March 14, 2006)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Harmonia Mundi Fr.
• ASIN: B000BT5EDS
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #253,820 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Economy Based on Beauty, June 2, 2008

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Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rose, the Lily & the Whortleberry (Medieval Gardens in Music) - Orlando Consort (Audio CD)

[Authors' preface, months later: I should have given it FIVE STARS.]

In the "illuminated" (hand-painted) manuscripts of the 14th-16th Centuries, one sees a world of lost beauty. The skies were bluer, the breezes more sweetly scented, the birds more abundant, the stars more numerous, and it was blessedly quiet. Quiet enough to hear a lute in a garden. Quiet enough that the sounds of threshing and fulling cloth must have mingled pleasantly with the voices of monks and confraternalists chanting the Hours. A look at the clothes and furniture depicted in the paintings proves surely that beauty took precedence over comfort. Even the sheep-cotes and fish weirs of the era show an attention to beauty of design, and tourists today pay fortunes to trot through the crumbling ruins of the handsome cottages and sumptuous palaces of the late Middle Ages.

A choice selection of miniature paintings is reproduced in this booklet/CD package from The Orlando Consort. The booklet is 114 pages of pictures, song texts, and essays concerning gardens, floral symbolism, and music from France, England, Spain, Italy, and Burgundy. The CD includes motets and chansons by composers such as Guillaume Machaut, Walter Frye, Juan Vasquez, Cipriano de Rore, and Alexander Agricola. As a musical program, frankly the selection is too diverse and inclusive to make concert sense, but no law requires you to listen to the CD all in one sitting. [That's my response to the intelligent but over-critical previous review by Maddy Evil.] Piece by piece, The Orlando Consort has never sounded better or more sensitive to stylistic nuances.

Virtually all music from the late Medieval - early Renaissance is either three or four part composition, and whatever anyone tells you, performance by voices one-on-a-part was the norm and is the most satisfactory. This is particularly true in chansons, which are sung poetry above all. You've got to hear words! even if you don't understand the language. The Orlando Consort, an ensemble of four male singers, always delivers the poetry with emotive clarity. They also have a rare mastery of the rhythmic devices that make this music challenging and interesting. Hocket is an example. Hocket is the inclusion of silences in the melodic lines - not mere rests! melodic silences, often lasting only a fraction of a beat. When hockets are alternated in lines of polyphony, the notes seem to be tossed like balls between the singers, and the lines of melody interpenetrate each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Hocket requires intense togetherness and reckless confidence. The Orlandos also have superb tuning, the best of any vocal ensemble singing early music; there are special challenges in this repertoire that they have to overcome. The pre-Dufay selections on this disk, for instance, require Pythagorean tuning, while the later pieces sound best with Mean tuning; the former requires perfect fourths and sixths, while the latter demands perfect thirds, lower than modern piano tunings, and proportionate fifths. Modern tempered tuning just won't work. Of course, all the technique in creation wouldn't matter if the singers didn't have lovely voices, because, like everything in the Age of Beauty, music was above all intended to be beautiful. This is a beautiful little package of words, pictures, and music. It would make a stunning Valentine.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Constant Gardener, May 14, 2007

By 

S. E. Vogiatzis (Athens, Greece) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rose, the Lily & the Whortleberry (Medieval Gardens in Music) - Orlando Consort (Audio CD)

Gardening is not one of my strong points. Actually I hardly notice them, unless we are talking about the legendary English ones or one of the marvelous Versailles. In this particular case, gardens are not only wonderful, fine and well maintained. They are medieval. And the music of this CD is most becoming to their beauty.

I have to confess that though I am a profound fan of sacred early music I am not equally attracted to the somehow light mood of the secular scores of the same period. This Harmonia Mundi compilation, though secular in subject, achieves a musical result of the magnitude we experience in sacred works: Soothing and meditating. Accompanied by a booklet full of gardening information and exquisite pictures.

In short, a magnificent and remarkable work. And not without reason: Paradise Lost was actually a garden...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, Wow, Wow! Totally Mesmerizing Indeed!, August 25, 2007

By 

Sumella - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Rose, the Lily & the Whortleberry (Medieval Gardens in Music) - Orlando Consort (Audio CD)

This whole package from Harmonia Mundi and Orlando Consort exceeded our expectations in recording quality, cover design, booklet information and overall performance. The music seems so very refined and well sung and the extra documentation provided in the fat booklet makes it a pleasure to indulge in the overall experience this package gives you.

Buy it now if you are a fan of Orlando Consort!