Red Byrd, supported by Cappella Amsterdam, have made here a fine contribution to the repertoire on disc of twelfth-century polyphony. These nine graduals and alleluias represent the best of Leonin’s work. They are sung with simplicity and conviction, with no attempt to produce a specifically medieval sound: the music is allowed to speak for itself, each section following on with a natural flow and with the Amsterdam singers providing a rich legato backcloth with their unadorned chant phrases. The net result is a composite sound of great beauty, performed in a resonant acoustic – never actually to be identified in the booklet, however: was it a church in The Netherlands? Mark Everist’s notes are most helpful – even to the totally uninitiated, one quick read and all becomes clear: there’s really no need for much background knowledge to understand what is going on. Unfortunately, though, all this good work is marred by careless editing: some of the liturgical items have been wrongly labelled in the section containing the texts together with English translations – even to the extent of being in contradiction with the insert-notes – and to make matters worse, one of the Alleluya verses, Angelus Domini descendit, is omitted altogether. All this is misleading enough, but that is not all. These pieces are settings of extremely well-known liturgical texts, but here a number of misreadings of the Latin, resulting in ludicrous translations, are not just silly in themselves: more seriously, they do detract from the value of the whole recording, because one is surely entitled to assume that if there is good scholarship anywhere it is going to be maintained throughout.'