Gothic Voices

Probably copied around 1200, this songbook was discarded within a generation or so and used as flyleaves for another book. It was poorly written, decayed and damp, marred by stains and the ravages of time, but because the pages were being used for another purpose, some unknown benefactor preserved this wealth of music and poetry. The songbook then remained hidden for some six hundred years.

This recording is an almost complete anthology of songs from the booklet. It isn’t known where it was copied, but it is believed to be an important religious foundation that housed by chance a few unusually keen singers. Many of the pieces are associated with major feasts of the liturgical year, including some which fall in the intensely festive period between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The tone of many of the texts is therefore joyful.

This recording from Gothic Voices and Christopher Page—acknowledged as one of the finest performances of medieval music of the last twenty years—follows their many Gramophone Award-winning albums and celebrates the anonymous English composers of the fourteenth century. The combination of Page’s tremendous scholarship, the simple beauty of the singing and the extraordinary freshness of the music is irresistible.

This beautiful and iconic re-release from the award winning Gothic Voices is an illuminating journey through medieval Italy.

While most of us might regard Pierre de La Rue as a composer of ‘early’ music, for Dr Page and his Gothic Voices this is bordering on the avant garde: this recording represents a leap forward a century from the group’s more accustomed repertoire, and the results are impressive to say the least.

La Rue was remarkably prolific; at least twenty-nine Masses can be ascribed to him with confidence, and the Missa De Feria and Missa Sancta Dei genitrix are among the finest. His music is full of imitation, a sense of choreography, and is coloured by a fondness for particularly low registers.

In addition to the two Masses, this disc includes the large-scale Pater de celis Deus, arguably the grandest of La Rue’s motets and a work full of counterpoint in its three-part, six-voice canon, and three other motets performed as lute intabulations in editions specially prepared for this recording by Christopher Wilson.

This latest reissue from Gothic Voices forms a pair with the Missa Caput (CDH55284). Missa Veterem hominem is an anonymous English Mass from circa 1440. It is a work of intricate detail and great significance as one of the earliest examples of a composition for what we would regard today as a ‘standard’ four-part choir. It is performed here with captivating vigour and commitment.

Also included are hymns from the Sarum chant books. The presentation of these monophonic songs makes this disc an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the tunes (Christe, qui lux es, Jesu salvator, and Salvator mundi, for example) which lie beneath so many later polyphonic works by Tallis and numerous others. But if that isn’t enough, they are also sung with extreme conviction and an austere yet remarkable beauty.

The English anonymous fifteenth-century Missa Caput at the centre of this disc is probably the most significant work from the period. It was copied all across Britain and the Continent and was largely responsible for the universal adoption of the ‘parody Mass’ technique and of today’s standard fourpart choir arrangement. It is a work of great stature and beauty, in this performance interspersed with a curious Latin poem which describes how two small boys composed the Salve regina antiphon while languishing in Hell.

Also represented here are six fifteenth-century carols, and an exquisite Agnus Dei from the Old Hall Manuscript.