Trio Mediaeval was founded four years ago in Oslo‚ and this is their first recording. Their voices are clear‚ firm and highly attractive. The three women can sing so alike that in the rondellus passages of Salve mater misericordie it is almost impossible to tell which voice is on top‚ so magically do they match colour and the slightest details of articulation. But they can also sound quite different from one another in the Messe de Tournai‚ where the three voices have clearly different structural functions. Their intonation is also astonishingly pure. Refreshingly candid‚ they are quite explicit that the music on this disc was almost certainly intended for men’s voices. ‘The Trio’s answer is to sing the music as though it is music of the present’‚ writes John Potter in his lucid liner­notes. This they certainly do‚ with notable skill and with an uncanny way of characterising each piece. One of the main difficulties of this repertory is that so much of the music is in a jogging triple time‚ and part of their success is the way they make all those triple times sound so varied. The Messe de Tournai forms the backbone of the disc‚ the six movements separated as they would be in a celebration of the mass‚ but fill­ing the gaps with two other early repertories: monophonic Italian laude from the Cortona manuscript‚ and English sacred polyphony from around 1300‚ including some astonishing pieces from the recently discovered Berkeley Castle fragment. Ivan Moody’s Words of the Angel‚ written specially for Trio Mediaeval and making superb use of their voices‚ adds a nice touch of something slightly different before the end.