The musicians of Sinfonye go from strength to strength. This is their third record for Hyperion, and my own first instinct was increasing admiration for the wonderfully tactful and resourceful drumming of Jim Denley, the range of colours and textures Stevie Wishart can draw from her fiddle, the inventive playing of Paula Chateauneuf on the oud and particularly the superbly sensitive way in which Vivien Ellis projects the troubadour songs. Using for the most part what is effectively a slow isosyllabic style, she presents the songs primarily as poems that happen to have a melodic line attached to them. And that seems the right solution for several reasons: first, the real artistic quality of the songs is indeed in their poetry and textual sounds; second, most of the melodies are in fact grafted on from elsewhere, because the poems of the female troubadours almost all survive without music of their own; third, where a melody of this repertory happens to survive in several manuscripts it normally does so with quite substantial variants between the various readings—that is to say that it is usually impossible to point to any particular melody as being the true original tune.
But perhaps the most important feature of the recording is that the instrumental interludes are so well designed. In music of this kind, where only a melody survives, performers wishing to incorporate instruments (a wish that is in any case now controversial) almost invariably become too selfindulgent, producing a homespun medievality that tends to tedium. The arrangements here are without exception musically compelling, normally derived by speeding up the original melody. What I happen to like rather less is the attempt to play a few sophisticated polyphonic motets on instruments with a drone, but these are in any case all very brief. For the rest, the performances show a new and compelling approach to the ever-fraught problems of presenting early monophonic song. For once, the full texts and translations in the leaflet are thoroughly helpful; and one feels that every detail of the texts has been understood and clearly reflected in the performaces.'