Reputedly hanged for debauchery at Paris in 1304, Jehannot de Lescurel is a perplexing figure. His 30-odd songs are known from only a single manuscript, but their style and place there seem to mark him as a key figure of his time, in some ways prefiguring the songs of Machaut. To have some two-thirds of his songs all together on a single disc is an enormous asset and may help towards a juster appreciation of his work. As these performances show, there is a wide range of styles and literary approaches here, and he comes across as a composer of considerable resource.
The Gilles Binchois Ensemble seem to be moving towards ever gentler performances. Certainly one of the pieces is performed with bagpipes and shawm, but in general the emphasis is on pastel colours, particularly in the singing. Anne-Marie Lablaude may in any case count as the most restrained singer active in this kind of repertory: the pure colours and effortless diction of her performances here set the tone. But the other singers now come far closer to her kind of approach, particularly Lena-Susanne Norin and Dominique Vellard. This refusal to over-interpret obviously makes it easier to hear what Lescurel was doing.
The disc is well designed in terms of variety, mainly by varying the singers, offering different kinds of scoring (several songs are unaccompanied) and including the occasional piece performed by instruments alone. While some listeners may prefer not to have any instrumental participation, they should note that this is generally done with supreme tact.
What I perhaps miss is a sense of how the metrical structure works here. Most of the music is, literally speaking, in triple time, but it seems to me wrong to think of it as being in units of three beats. Its units are really of two beats, one long and one short, with the variety coming from which comes first and how they are subdivided. There is a certain lilt to the music that is not always audible here. However, that is a small detail: these are quality performances. '