This arrived just before Christmas and I rushed out to buy a dozen copies, thinking that my present-problem was solved (though I have never given people CDs for Christmas). Sadly, of course, it wasn’t yet in the stores; but this really is the kind of CD you can give to anybody. For those expert in medieval music, it offers a relatively unknown repertory hardly ever recorded; for music lovers who just want a new musical experience, it’s here in trumps; and for those who are not particularly musical it offers a vivid, ethnic-sounding experience with that taste of earthy spirituality that seems to go down well almost anywhere these days. It is the kind of issue that could sell fabulously if it gets the right promotion or catches the ear of the right radio station.
Presumably Gimell thought so too, for there are some very odd things about the packaging, quite apart from the meaningless cleavage that adorns the cover. The only title for the record seems to be the name of the group, Acantus; and I very much hope that this does not mean that Gimell has no plans to use the group any more, because it includes some of my favourite musicians – Alessandra Fiori, Gloria Moretti, Stefano Pilati and Marco Ferrari, people who have been doing excellent work for years but who have never quite managed to find an ensemble or a record company that remains intact. As the first ‘guest’ group ever to be issued by Gimell, it’s a confidence-inspiring choice; I just hope we shall hear more of them.
Another odd feature is that there is only the most indirect indication of what is recorded here, essentially just a list of titles (as given in the heading above) without mentioning that some pieces are from the thirteenth century, some from the fifteenth, one from the nineteenth and one from the contemporary folk tradition. Hints of that information appear in the Italian version of the insert-notes, rather less in the digest of it provided in other languages. With a substantial library at my disposal, I managed to identify about half of the pieces here; for the rest I’m baffled. But this repertory of semi-popular sacred music – known to scholars as ‘cantus planus binatim’, ‘primitive polyphony’ (in the days when such language was allowable), ‘polifonia semplice’ and ‘folk polyphony’ – contains many glorious pieces, and Acantus gives a massively convincing account of them.
As I said, with the right kind of luck this could easily be the runaway success that Gimell (like me) evidently hopes for and expects.'