Machaut: A Lover's Death The Orlando Consort

• Guillaume de Machaut (1300 - 1377):
• 1 Machaut: Hareu! hareu! le feu / Helas! ou sera pris confors / Obediens usque ad mortem, Motet 10 02:11
• 2 Machaut: Mors sui, se je ne vous voy, Virelai 26 04:11
• 3 Machaut: Je ne cuit pas, Ballada 14 05:09
• 4 Machaut: Quand je ne voy, Rondeau 21 05:34
• 5 Machaut: Diex, Biauté, Douceur, Nature, Virelai 19 06:03
• 6 Machaut: Biauté qui toutes autres pere, Ballade 4 04:35
• 7 Machaut: Quant vraie amour enflamee / O series summe rata / Super omnes speciosa, Motet 17 02:40
• 8 Machaut: De petit po, Ballada 18 04:23
• 9 Machaut: Dous viaire gracieus, Rondeau 1 01:27
• 10 Machaut: Douce dame jolie, Virelai 4 03:11
• 11 Machaut: Amours me fait desirer, Ballade 19 04:25
• 12 Machaut: Ce qui soustient moy, Rondeau 12 03:23
• 13 Machaut: Amours qui ha le pouoir / Faus Samblant m'a deceu / Vidi Dominum, Motet 12 02:28
• 14 Machaut: N'en fait n'en dit, Ballade 11 03:48
• 15 Machaut: Ma chiere dame, Ballade 40 04:58
• 16 Machaut: Liement me deport, Virelai 27 06:13
• 17 Machaut: Martyrum gemma latria / iligenter inquiramus / A Christo honoratus, Motet 19 03:15
• Total Runtime 01:07:54

Info for Machaut: A Lover's Death

The eleventh and final release in The Orlando Consort’s comprehensive Machaut survey easily maintains the standards of its predecessors. The closing couplet of the final track—‘Their singing will be sublime / Harmoniously will they render him praise’—might well serve as a motto for the Orlandos’ achievement, not only in this album but throughout an illustrious career.

Although we generally know little about medieval artists, the poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut (c1300-1377) constitutes a happy exception. We possess more of his works than of any other composer before 1500. Machaut’s self-consciousness as an artist compelled him to collect his compositions, both literary and musical, in a work-book ‘that contains all the things I have made’ and from which he had beautiful manuscripts copied for his wealthy patrons. A fair number of these codices have been preserved, among which six contain his music. Without these manuscripts we would have knowledge of only a small number of apparently popular works by Machaut, as copied in other song collections.

This recording features four motets that capture the range of Machaut’s art in this genre. Motets probably belong to his first polyphonic compositions; all four recorded here date from before 1350. In Machaut’s time the motet had developed into a learned genre, calling both for knowledge of music theory and practice, and for literary erudition. Motets are usually built on a fragment from Gregorian chant that is rhythmicized in the taleae, slow repeated rhythmic patterns in the tenor. The upper voices, called triplum and motetus, move more quickly, in phrases that correspond with these taleae. Their melodies harmonize with the tenor notes but can also create contrasts, especially in the middle voice (the motetus). The words of the chant fragment bear a relationship to the subjects explored in the texts of the upper voices, and part of the game is to discover how that relationship functions. Brief as motets are in performance, to fully understand them demands deep study. These works were destined for connoisseurs who themselves wrote motets and exchanged ideas. In two motets by other composers, Machaut is mentioned in the company of twelve such learned men, among whom we find Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361), the other great composer from the fourteenth century. Several of Machaut’s works show traces of influence from music by Vitry. ...

Orlando Consort

The Orlando Consort
Formed in 1988 by the Early Music Network of Great Britain, The Orlando Consort rapidly achieved a reputation as one of Europe’s most expert and consistently challenging groups performing repertoire from the years 1050 to 1550. Their work successfully combined captivating entertainment and fresh scholarly insight; the unique imagination and originality of their programming together with their superb vocal skills marked out the Consort as the outstanding leader of their field. The Orlando Consort performed at many of Britain’s top festivals (including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival) and toured in France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the USA and Canada, South America, Singapore, Japan, Greece, Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The Consort’s impressive discography includes a collection of music by John Dunstaple and ‘The Call of the Phoenix’, which were selected as Early Music CDs of the Year by Gramophone in 1996 and 2003 respectively; their albums of music by Compère, Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, ‘Popes and Anti-Popes’, ‘Saracen and Dove’ and ‘Passion’ were all also shortlisted. Their 2008 release of Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame and Scattered Rhymes, an outstanding work by the British composer Tarik O’Regan and featuring the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, was shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine award. Of their series of recordings for Hyperion exploring the polyphonic songs of Guillaume de Machaut, the first release (‘Le Voir Dit’) was selected by The New York Times critics as one of their favourite recordings of 2013 and was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award, as were the fourth and eighth titles in the series (‘Sovereign Beauty’ and ‘The lion of nobility’) and their anthologies of music by Loyset Compère and Guillaume Dufay.

The Consort’s performances also embraced the spheres of contemporary music and improvisation: they performed over thirty premieres and created striking collaborations with the jazz group Perfect Houseplants and, for a project exploring historic Portuguese and Goan music, the brilliant tabla player Kuljit Bhamra. A grand project presenting Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc with a live soundtrack of music composed during the lifetime of Joan of Arc was presented seventy times across Europe and the USA, with the fiftieth performance taking place at the Salzburg Festival in 2018.

The Consort presented its farewell concert at the 2023 Boston Early Music Festival, and this final album, ‘A lover’s death’, represents the fulfilment of the group’s long-standing ambition to record the complete polyphonic works of Guillaume de Machaut.

Booklet for Machaut: A Lover's Death