Music Review by Lou Wigdor Angelic Voices in Good
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So what do Anonymous 4 and Trio Mediaeval have in common? Both sing with extraordinary beauty, balance, delicacy of inflection, and an uncanny feel for internal rhythms. Both focus primarily on sacred repertoire from the late medieval/early renaissance world (usually the 13th and 14th centuries). And both bestow a women’s gloss on material that with few exceptions (e.g., A4’s involvement with Hildegard) was written by men for male voices. With Valentine’s Day a convenient eleven months away, it is perhaps safe to recommend The Second Circle as a low-risk gift alternative to flowers and chocolate. The disc offers seventeen jewel-like ballata, composed by Landini for two and three voices. Anonymous 4 adds a fourth voice to eight of the songs. The economy of the ballata and their stanza form-A-b-b-a-A-is the soul of Early Renaissance conciseness. The tracks on the disc range from 1:16 to 5:43 minutes, all but six clocking in at under four minutes. Landini’s love songs convey a daunting emotional range: on the sunny side, they contemplate love’s joy, love’s angelic beauty, love’s perfection. But be forewarned--darkness was also Landini’s delight. For Anonymous 4, that means conveying beautiful, at times, burnished harmonies about love unattainable, love unrequited, love unconsummated, and love lost. So who said eros, courtly love, and their variations were any more a cake walk in 13th century Florence? That leads to a concern about Anonymous 4’s take on Landini. The group’s performances of sacred music radiate a contemplative--at times, oracular-- beauty. Anonymous 4’s Landini exudes the secular analog--the restraint and formality, musically speaking, of courtly love. How does that square with Landini’s own multi-faceted emotionality? In my view, this doesn’t need to be an issue. With prismatic richness, Anonymous 4 refracts Landini’s variegated emotionality on the group’s own lapidary terms. These are performances of ravishing beauty and coloristic and rhythmic subtlety. All the same, there is certainly room for interpretations by others who bring an earthier emotional resonance to the songs.
Words of the Angel, like Anonymous 4’s An English Ladymass, features a 13th -14th century mass interspersed with Marist motets, sequences, and chants from the same period. Surviving in a cathedral manuscript from the once powerful mediaeval city of Tournai (just northeast of Lille, France, over the Belgian border), the Tournai Mass appears to be a compilation. The Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei employ a conventional 13th century modal rhythm; the Gloria, Credo, and Ita Missa Est display 14th century Ars Nova innovations, including freer rhythms and triadic harmonies. Interspersed with the mass are nine vividly polyphonic motets and sequences from 14th century England, and four monophonic (chants) laude from a thirteenth century manuscript from Cortona, in central Tuscany. Three of the English pieces survived only by accident. In the medieval world--especially in England-musical manuscripts often got recycled (sometimes in bookbinding) after falling prey to wars, secular and church politics, and shifting musical fashions. The three survivors here somehow got copied onto the back of a financial record, which accountants thought warranted eternal salvation (Today, the so-called Berkeley Castle Select Roll 55 might have gone the way of the Enron Financial Codex-straight into the shredder.) Through 14th century eyes, the one time-warper in the program is the cd’s title track, Words of the Angel, written by the present-day London-born composer, Ivan Moody. Like his former teacher, John Tavener, Moody has found religious affiliation and musical inspiration in the Greek Orthodox church. Taken from the Orthodox Easter day liturgy, Words is a tour de force of sinuous chant and unadorned contrapuntal statements, alternating with a broad and occasionally dissonant brush of soaring and cascading polyphonies. After that stunning 5:27-minute performance, there is nothing to do but adjourn the disc with the Tournai’s Ita Missa Est (i.e., Go, it is dismissed.) During my conversation with Susan Hellauer, I asked her if she knew of any other Early Music women’s groups doing similar repertoire to Anonymous 4’s. Together, we came up with only one, Tapestry, an American quartet that records for Telarc. I told her that I admired its ambitious repertoire but felt that its balance and tonal purity were not in Anonymous 4’s league. At long last, Ms. Hellauer and Anonymous 4, with the emergence of Trio Mediaeval, are in good company. With this troika, three is anything but a crowd. Also Recommended
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©2002 by Lou Wigdor |
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