Worcester Ladymass

Trio Mediaeval (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 15, 2011)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Ecm Records
• ASIN: B004IXPXGG
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,661 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

The Boston Globe

"The three female voices combine to produce a sound of extraordinary and consoling beauty. The singers also operate on a high level of musicianship and technical sophistication..."

Product Description

A Worcester Ladymass marks a welcome return for Oslo's Trio Mediaeval. It's their first new recording in four years (Folk Songs was recorded in February 2007), as well as the first of their discs since Stella Maris (2005) to incorporate the medieval sacred music for which their vocal sound seems so eminently suited. As England' s Daily telegraph observed, "The word `mellifluous' might almost have been coined to describe the distinctively pure, cool sound of Trio Mediaeval's three female voices. It has an alluring quality all its own, which makes everything they sing - from the earliest polyphony to newly composed pieces which, to some extent, inhabit the same sound-world - wonderfully rewarding to listen to."

On their fifth ECM New Series album, Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum present a reconstruction of a 13th century votive Mass to the Virgin Mary, based on manuscripts and fragments originating in an English Benedictine Abbey. As Nicky Losseff, the trio's medieval music editor, explains in the liner notes, "complex polyphonic music was important to the monks who lived at the Abbey of St Mary's, Worcester. Polyphony gave life to the otherwise `plain' song of the liturgy. At Worcester, an unusual number of single leaves and fragments have survived. Through them, we have been left more than 100 songs, in many different musical styles: polyphony to adorn the movements of the Mass; the freely-composed, intricately-interweaving voices of motets; the stricter, declamatory tones of the conductus. All in all, it testifies to a thriving musical community. "

Singing this music today is more than `interpretation', as Anna Maria Friman emphasizes: "There is a lot of guesswork and individual intuition in medieval music performances. We feel that performing this music gives us freedom to let our imagination and ideas flow, as though we are creating contemporary music." The trio lays no claim to historical "authenticity" here: "It is impossible to know what this music would have sounded like in the middle ages and therefore impossible to recreate a mediaeval vocal sound."This can be a creative bonus: "We have chosen to use the lack of original information to inform our performance in the present." In the case of the Ladymass, this has sometimes necessitated the bridging of fragments with new music. Noting that the Worcester Mass lacked a Credo and a Benedicamus Domino, the singers invited Gavin Bryars, a supporter of the group since its earliest days, to compose the appropriate settings. Bryars proposed that his pieces be inserted into the Ladymass in such a way as to "maintain the same ethos, without any sense of incongruity", despite the fact that his compositions would sound audibly different from the surrounding sections. The old and the new, literally and conceptually, intermingle in the work of this vocal ensemble.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AND GAVIN BRYARS, October 6, 2011

By 

Kerry Leimer (Makawao, Hawaii United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Worcester Ladymass (Audio CD)

Perhaps as a result of his recasting of medieval Lauds for the 2005 "Oi Me Lasso" -- performed by Anna Maria Friman of Trio Mediaeval -- Gavin Bryars was asked to complete this Ladymass by composing two missing pieces, the 5:14 "Credo" and the 1:19 closing "Benedicamus Domino". Like his work for "Oi Me Lasso", Bryars takes the basic polyphonic material and style of the period and gently lifts it into greater harmonic complexity. The contrast this creates within the Worcester Ladymass is both subtle and profoundly moving, shading the understated beauty of 13th Century sacred music with a hovering, shimmering 21st century harmonic depth left untouched -- or simply not understood -- by these anonymous precursors. The story of where and how these pieces were found and restored is fascinating, and again gives us pause concerning the many points in history during which religious zeal lead to the destruction and often complete elimination of remarkable and rare works of art and understanding. As for the recording itself, my ears find this performance to be more spare and focused than much of the A4 catalog. The Propstei St. Gerold soundstage as presented in this recording seems much drier and consequently more specific than many other spaces. The smaller scale space seems wholly appropriate to the compositional period, offering an authentic sense of austerity and beauty that is more completely reliant on the performance itself.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trio , sounds like anonymous 4, August 22, 2011

By 

compost guy - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Worcester Ladymass (Audio CD)

Trio Medieval sounds very much like Anonymous 4. If you like the one, you will like the other. This CD is very well recorded. The sound is full and fabulous without any harshness. The voices roll out of the speakers like the waves on the album cover and the listener easily becomes submerged in the sound and the beauty.