Walter Frye may be something of a key-figure in the middle years of the fifteenth century. His Ave regina celorum survives in far more sources than any other work of its time, evidently well loved in all corners of the continental mainland; and his other known music shows the transition from the style of Dunstable to the more florid English music later in the century. Most of his music now survives only in continental sources, and much of it raises questions of authorship, design and date. But, partly because of those questions, he is a composer who has aroused much interest from historians over the years, and it is good that another record should be devoted to his music.
This contains the most ambitious of his three Mass cycles plus all the smaller works that appear in the somewhat creaky complete edition by Sylvia Kenney published in 1960. Dirk Freymuth is credited with editing the music for this record––apparently for the most part fixing some of the errors in Kenney, though for the Mass and the Salve virgo he could have learned something from Gareth Curtis's more recent edition. He also comes up with an attractive but dotty solution to the form of the rondeau Tout a par moy.
The Hilliard Ensemble sing with their customary elegance and sense of style. For the Mass they adopt a generally fast tempo, one that stresses the broad plan rather than the often questionable details. The point here, I think, is that Frye does have a slightly strange contrapuntal style with certain dissonances and redundancies that were avoided by most of his contemporaries, and the performances do not always give the impression that the musicians have taken that style entirely on board. But the singing is skilled and marvellously clear. The record is a challenging and valuable contribution.'