The Clerks’ Group is pared down here to its simplest line-up, with a single voice to a part. This makes sense in fourteenth-century repertories, and it gives The Clerks a freshness and directness that has at times been lacking in recent recordings. A new departure is the repertory explored, obviously earlier than anything the group has previously attempted, and no longer merely composer-based. Machaut gets top billing, but much of the programme is anonymous and derives from a single source, the Ivrea Codex (copied in the latter years of the century). This consists of settings of individual Mass movements, for the most part chordally conceived, declamatory and decidedly extrovert. In that sense it contrasts nicely with the introversion of Machaut’s three-voice songs, and shows off The Clerks at their best. The singers also indulge themselves with a memorable rendition of one of this repertory’s most famous pieces, Clap, clap/Sus Robin. It may no longer need saying, but I’ll say it anyway: don’t be put off by the anonymous tag.
One gets a clear enough impression from this recording of the lines of stylistic demarcation that Machaut draws in his work: the three-voice songs are audibly ‘experimental’ in their chromatic turns, while the four-voice Latin motets prize rhetorical effects of texture and large-scale design (although the manner in which successive voices are introduced in Tu qui gregem/Plange, regni and Felix virgo/Inviolata is equally strange, the latter’s soft tones contrasting sharply with Gothic Voices’ interpretation on Hyperion, 1/84). Those familiar with previous recordings of the songs (for example the two versions of Dame, je suis cilz/Fins cuers doulz, again with Gothic Voices, as above) will hear differences in the editions used (here, by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson); they may also hear that The Clerks’ declamation of French is not as clear as that in Latin-texted pieces (whether Machaut’s or the works from Ivrea), resulting in less strongly imaged performances of the most wilfully characterful music here. As an all-Machaut recital this would face formidable competition, but the Ivrea music leavens the programme and fills a gap in the catalogue very elegantly.FF