THE ROSE, THE LILY & THE WHORTLEBERRY

 

Medieval & Renaissance Gardens in Music

 

Worcester Fragments; songs and motets by Guillaume de Machaut, Trebor, Frye, Power, Brumel, Agricola,

Vázquez, Ceballos, Guerrero, Claudin De Sermissy, Lupi, Carpentras, Arcadelt, Cipriano de Rore,

Phinot, Crequillon, Clemens Non Papa, Gombert

 

The Orlando Consort with Robert Macdonald (bass)

 

Since its formation in 1988, the award-winning Orlando Consort has been hailed as the most imaginative champion of vocal music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Collaborating with leading musicologists, the Consort has premiered repertoire unheard in modern times and set new standards of performance in matters of ensemble, pronunciation and tuning.

 

In celebration of the floral imagery used by many of Europe’s greatest composers over a span of 300 years to depict both earthly and heavenly love, the Orlando Consort sings poetic texts ranging from the sacred to the downright suggestive. A must have for gardeners from the Eden Project to Inverewe, via Wisley.

 

Rarely does an early music CD afford as luscious a feast for the eye as for the ear. This one, however, comes with an elegant hardback book containing a generous measure of background information, and also a gorgeous selection of beautifully reproduced medieval and Renaissance paintings, in which gardens feature as the scene of hard horticultural labour as well as amorous assignation.

"Song of Songs" settings bulk large among the sacred items in the imaginatively chosen programme, which moves chronologically from Machaut to the mid-16th century. Thanks to the luminous clarity of the Orlando Consort's all-male sound and their finely nuanced attention to interpretative detail, motets such as Guerrero's serene Quasi cedrus and Brumel's exquisitely simple and tender Sicut lilium lose nothing of their effect in these one-to-a-part performances.

The more delicately expressive secular pieces, such as Machaut's mellifluous Rose, liz, printemps, benefit from a similar approach. Earthier ones such as Clemens non Papa's frankly indecent, innuendo-laden Au ioly bocquet and Sermisy's graphically inebriated paean to the viticulturist's pruning-knife, Changeons propos, produce an altogether more robust response.

Elizabeth Roche, Telegraph

 

Harmonia Mundi HMU907398