In this recording the Orlando Consort have made a substantial contribution to the corpus of English medieval music available on disc. They offer the listener a remarkable hour-long sampling of the so-called Worcester repertoire of polyphony, recovered from collections of fly-leaves contained in a number of sources, notably Worcester MS Add.68. The 25 items recorded here represent about one quarter of the total. They provide the listener with the chance to gain an overall impression of how music developed in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries—a development distinguished by its intriguing variety, creativity and undoubted beauty, its peculiar sweetness being marked by the constant harmonic use of the interval of a third.
Vocal groups seeking authenticity of performance are attempting with ever-increasing determination to reproduce the type of buzzing vocal timbre believed to have been that of the Middle Ages. The Orlando Consort have not failed to jump on this popular band-waggon. Their strength, however, is that they manage to achieve a balance between this sort of experimentation with its roughness of approach and their own good solid modern standards of professional musicianship. Some listeners may be puzzled by the Consort's attempts to reproduce what scholars now believe to have been the way in which Ecclesiastical Latin was pronounced in medieval England. This is another area of experimentation which is firing the imagination of numerous early music groups. The ones who succeed best are those who manage to make it sound absolutely unselfconscious. Happily, the Orlando Consort is well on the way to achieving this.
That said, one can, I think, listen to this repertoire with a fresh ear, just sitting back and enjoying a unique performance which includes such diverse gems as the conductus Beata viscera, with its quietly harmonious blend of voices, or the vigorous canonic Ave virgo mater, or again, the gently-moving Lux polis refulgens aurea.'