In certain respects this record is a superb achievement, bringing together as it does some good music and the expert voices of the Hilliard Ensemble. More than ever before, the blend between the voices is finely controlled, the tone mellow and the tuning spectacularly accurate, giving rise to an organ-like sonority that is genuinely thrilling. Whether or not Lassus intended the three motets included here to be sung by solo voices is, however, another matter. Following them, the sequence of chansons that makes up the record's second side offers a contrast in mood rather than of sonority, since these too are sung under the same rather generous acoustic conditions. This brings me to my first criticism: listening carefully to this and a wide range of the Hilliard Ensemble's records, it does seem surprising that so many of them should sound so very nearly the same, emphasizing as they do the style of the group's personality rather then the individual and often sharply-contrasted characteristics of the different pieces and repertories that they perform. The point is well illustrated within the present issue, in which the readings of Stabat mater and (for example) Fleur de quinze ans really sound very little different from one another. That they should fail to do so is surely a matter of rather serious artistic oversight.
There are few texts in the Roman Catholic liturgy that exude quite so much pathos and sensuous passion as does the Stabat mater sequence. The Hilliard Ensemble, however, chooses to keep their distance from the emotional frenzy of the words, emphasizing instead the euphony and sonority of the setting, and the skill of Lassus's imitative counterpoint. So little rhetoric do they draw from the piece that the group might as well have done without the words altogether. The same is no less true of Fleur de quinze ans, one of the smuttiest pieces of poetry that Lassus ever put to music. To judge by their humourless, 'instrumental' response to this piece, one might conclude that the members of the Hilliard Ensemble simply do not understand French. The point is surely an important one. to Lassus and his audiences the words and their meanings came first; to the Hilliard Ensemble they clearly do not, and this severely reduces the expressiveness of their performances. Musical, and vocally magnificent, the singers remain from the first groove to the very last; but have they really penetrated to the very hearts of the pieces that they perform?'