These records are not easy to understand or explain. The accompanying notes are less concerned with helping the listener than with discussing the controversies of chant rhythm—controversies that are obviously of major importance but perhaps peripheral to the enjoyment of two hours of chant. And much of the singing shows the same priorities. There is often a lack of flow or impetus, as though the performers were more concerned with the small details than with what happens—musically and spiritually—in two of the grandest celebrations in the church year. Consistent freedom arrives only with the last work, the famous Easter Play from Engelberg, written some 400 years after the rest of the music on the record and not open to the same sorts of controversy about rhythm.
Briefly, the rest consists of music for the Palm Sunday procession and Mass and for the Easter Vigil, mostly taken from the earliest known chant sources. Among the five men who sing all this, there are voices ranging from the superb to the frankly unenticing; but that variety helps to modify the sameness with which some of the most glorious and ambitious music of the Gregorian repertory is sung. The three women who take part in the Engelberg play are more even in quality and are matched by a fine baritone representing the risen Christ. I should perhaps mention one further feature of the interpretation, the courageous way in which the musicians approach apparent microtonal inflexions and unusual ornaments in the sources: occasionally this results in a disturbing insecurity on the basic pitches (without which any chant becomes shapeless); and it again rather interrupts the flow. But the attempt was perhaps worth making.
The engineers have caught the voices with admirable evenness and clarity. The booklet includes essays by R. John Blackley, Dom Gregory Murray and Denis Stevens.'