This was the last of the wonderful series of fifteenth-century song sets issued by L'Oiseau-Lyre Florilegium under the initiative of the late Peter Wadland. Like the others—the complete Dufay songs and the complete Chansonnier Cordiforme—it was hardly intended for continuous listening throughout and therefore sits far better in CD format, where songs can be selected individually and repeated for more concentrated listening. Also like the others, it is a touch uneven in quality: perhaps two-thirds of the pieces here receive magnificent performances that go straight to the centre of the music, while a few merely skim the surface.
When this recording was first so warmly welcomed by IF, much of the music was unpublished: Ockeghem's true status as a composer of songs was newly revealed. Now that all the music is available in print, most of it several times over (particularly with Richard Wexler's recent completion of the Ockeghem edition and two extensive German doctoral dissertations), it is worth noting the extraordinarily high quality of the transcriptions provided by Peter Davies for the recording. He includes all the songs likely to be by Ockeghem together with a few that are now believed spurious and have not been included in Wexler's edition. And the musicians often show that rare excitement that can come from revealing new repertory on the basis of solid new research. This is particularly the case with the two singers who already had wide experience in fifteenth-century song and who have continued to open our ears to its wonders in their subsequent recordings with Gothic Voices—Margaret Philpot and Rogers Covey-Crump. (Note to the producers of Florilegium: it really is time that we had retrospective records devoted to showing a range of the achievements of these two glorious singers who have done so much to bring the repertory to life.)
The transfer is excellent; the booklet gives all the necessary information and presents the texts with perfect clarity. In its new easy-access CD format, the set seems to me a required purchase for all serious collections. Roll on the reissues of the other great Florilegium sets.'