Anyone who has followed the work of the Orlando Consort has been waiting for them to record Notre Dame music ever since they were formed ten years ago. As we may expect from their earlier records, they use here the best and newest editions, namely the grand new set currently being produced by L’Oiseau-Lyre. As we may also expect, they present the music with remarkable lyricism and sweetness.
In the two-voice organa of the Magnus liber, generally thought the work of Leonin, my own ear tends to prefer a rather more virtuosic approach to the gloriously florid lines; but it is easy to agree that the Orlando’s gentler reading is perhaps more in line with the decorum that would have been expected from the musicians who first presented this new and astonishingly extended way of singing the grand services of the church year. They sing with such refined intonation that the music is irresistible.
For the three-voice organa of the “School of Perotin” they magnificently succeed in the most important task, which is to make the lilting triple rhythms fluid, whereas they can so easily sound joggy and meaningless. But their finest achievement is in what must count as the grandest and most difficult piece in this entire repertory, the enormous four-voice Sederunt principes of Perotin. The work is quite exceptionally minimalist in its restraint, its gentle onward flow, its almost obsessive concentration on a very small number of chords, its glorious canvases generated from so little material. Here the suave approach of the Orlandos brings the very best results, and it makes the recording required listening for anybody who loves this music.
The intervening monophonic sections, and the separate chants, are performed by men and boys from the Westminster Cathedral Choir in an extreme equalist manner – that is, not just giving every note absolutely equal length but also making each note equally important. They actively resist any temptation to make the melodies flow or take on any subjective shape. Some listeners may find this extreme position fascinating, though I have trouble thinking how anybody could gain any aesthetic satisfaction from it. But the wonders of the CD are such that these are easily skipped in favour of the glorious singing of the Orlando in the polyphony.
'