The start of this recital promises something bracingly ahistorical: the aeolian wind and unpitched instrumental sounds might have come straight out of a contemporary piece, albeit (some might say) of a rather old-fashioned type. Only when Clara Coutouly begins to sing is it clear that this is a programme of trouvère songs. Thereafter, it takes a ‘traditional’ (not to say old-fashioned) approach to performance practice of this repertoire, insofar as much is added to the musical text: lengthy instrumental introductions and interludes, doublings of the one notated texted part by a plucked string or a recorder, drones or accompanying lines, assorted percussion … the revisionist, stripped-down approach advocated by the Gothic Voices of Christopher Page’s vintage seemingly a distant memory. It may be significant of the approach taken here that no translations are provided at all, even in modern French. Is it felt that the (notated) music and text can sustain neither the argument nor the listener’s attention?

Doubtless, some will find this opening summary harsh. For on their own terms these performances are very engaging, especially the instrumentalists’ interplay with the voices (and each other). But as so often in medieval repertories, and in answer to my own rhetorical question, it is the instruments that struggle to hold the attention in the face of a compelling vocal presence, such as Coutouly possesses. In Mout m’abelis, they seem to be thrust forwards in the mix, whereas I would have been quite happy to hear her more clearly, even (yes) on her own. (The opener, En un vergier, shows her off to best advantage.) In the seduction scene L’aultrier quant je chevochoie she is joined by the countertenor Paulin Bündgen, who plays the knight to her damsel (a strategy reprised in the concluding Volez vos que je vous chant). Whether the verse’s narrative structure would have been thus divided between a man and a woman seems unlikely, but the decision to do so bespeaks the familiarising impulse noted above.