The Ferrara Ensemble offers here a very well conceived cycle of chansons and motets d’amour‚ engagingly reflected upon in Jacques Boogaart’s detailed commentary. In this note‚ Boogaart comments that ‘in all [Machaut’s] works the listener is struck by the pursuit of the rare and the yet unheard’‚ and in doing so‚ pinpoints precisely the central problem in performing this repertoire. How do we‚ as performers or listeners‚ understand this pursuit‚ and how do we believe it should be transmitted? This beautifully recorded collection shows that it is possible for ‘the rare and the yet unheard’ to pass us by‚ the quest for a beautiful sound having the capacity of neutralising the not infrequent harmonic and melodic audacities of Machaut’s writing. The impressionistic smoothness of the Ferrara Ensemble’s sound‚ while lovely in itself‚ can have the effect of evening out the unpredictable contours of the music a little too much; as an illustration‚ one might compare the performance here of Lasse! comment/Se j’aim/Pour quoi me bat mes maris? with that of the Early Music Consort of London (Archiv)‚ originally recorded in 1975. There one hears the piece in all its angular strangeness‚ its colours still fresh almost 30 years later. On the other hand‚ if one compares the Ferrara Ensemble with Gothic Voices – try Trop plus/Biauté parée/je ne sui‚ recorded by the British ensemble on their collection ‘The Study of Love’ in 1991 (Hyperion‚ 6/93) – the limitations of the opposite approach become equally evident. The flat‚ nasal sound (and the speed: Gothic Voices take almost a minute less than the Ferrara) do not allow one to enter into the piece‚ and one hardly feels the music’s harmonic subtleties. There can be no doubt‚ then‚ that this is a significant recording in a still largely untilled field. Presentation and programming are excellent‚ and Machaut enthusiasts should not miss this disc.