Messe a Quarte

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

Guillaume de Machaut was one of the great composers of a pivotal period at the intersection between the late medieval times and the Renaissance. His works include sacred compositions, such as his Messe de Nostre Dame, which took polyphonic music to new summits, as well as popular dances and songs that reveal the influence of the trouvères.
Yet this disc actually contains little music by Machaut. Only the last two pieces are by him. This leads to a bit of confusion: is Calliope trying to use Machaut’s name to sell a compilation of medieval music? This barely seems necessary, yet there is clearly some ambiguity.

The ensemble MILLENARIUM has recorded several discs for RICERCAR devoted to the secular monodic repertoire of the Middle Ages. These are brought together here to give a very complete view of the secular part of mediaeval music, at a time when the only religious music was Gregorian chant. Here are to be found the principal sources of this repertoire: songs of the troubadours and trouvères, tender or bawdy pieces from the famous Carmina Burana manuscript, and from the same anthology, the reconstruction of the Messe des joueurs. It was in that monodic tradition that the famous Llibre Vermell of the Abbey of Montserrat was also composed, bringing together the songs of the pilgrims of Santiago de Compostela.