Don't be misled by the somewhat restrictive title! Half the music on this disc comes from Lent and Holy Week: the sleeve-note spells it out— ''The Easter Festival includes Lent, Holy Week and Easter Day itself''. It includes, too, some of the greatest pieces in the repertoire, which goes some way to explain why these particular choices are so popular with choirs making chant recordings. Yet I fear that if the listener is expecting a new exciting approach he may well be disappointed: these pieces were taped in Bavaria 15 years ago and are performed in a style that bears little relationship to the early notational discoveries that have caught the attention and fired the imagination of musicologists and chant singers alike. Basically, here is a performance in equal notes with inordinately overloaded lengthenings at cadences and before the quilisma (four to six times the value of the single note). To ears accustomed to more adventurous renderings, the result cannot avoid sounding somewhat tedious and lifeless. Piece after piece follows, unrelievedly, until quite near the end, when the situation is redeemed by the inspired insertion of a lively two-part setting of the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes, culled from the Las Huelgas manuscript. (How nice, incidentally, to think of those austere Spanish Cistercians indulging—and it was, of course, strictly forbidden—in such joyful two-part harmony!).
To give the singers their due, they do achieve a reasonably good legato, which one doesn't hear too often when English choirs perform the chant. The vocal blend, however, is unsatisfactory. I, personally, throughly appreciate a certain robustness of tone, but voices with prominent higher partials should seek to avoid being heard above the rest. There is also an unsolved pitch problem: the high F sharps in the Easter Alleluia. Why not simply transpose the whole piece down a tone!'