This is an attractive programme of Holy Week and Easter pieces, some by unlikely composers such as Tinctoris, the fifteenth-century musical theorist. It is centred around Isaac’s four-part Easter Mass, with its polytextual structure. Isaac sets all the pieces of the Proper, with the exception of the Offertory, and he interweaves three popular Easter tunes, using the technique of a migrating cantus firmus: Christus surrexit, originally a Kyrie trope metamorphosed into the much-loved German chorale Christus is erstanden, in the Introit, and the antiphon Regina caeli and the Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes in the Prose. (The editors of the booklet had a hard time sorting out the texts and translations so as to make them listener-friendly!) The end product is a wonderfully joyful and festive Mass, the nearest modern equivalent that comes to mind being Honegger’s Christmas cantata with its carol sequence.
Isaac’s Mass is flanked by Tinctoris’s moving Lamentation, two settings of the Victimae paschali laudes, and three fine pieces honouring the Cross.
The Orlando Consort do full justice to this splendid programme. Their reedy vocal quality has come to be accepted as that of the late medieval and early renaissance period. The singing is superb, the individual parts easily identifiable yet marvellously blended. Listeners may be slightly foxed by the pronunciation of the Latin, particularly by the nasal French vowels. Much care has gone into this search for authenticity. More could usefully have been reserved, though, for the alternating chant passages in the Dufay sequence.'