Oswald

It's hard to fill a music documentary with the same energy that ignited the movement, but Live Forever succeeds in charting the rise and decline of the Britpop genre with ease. Looking back on the 1990s phenomenon, it removes the rose-tinted spectacles that are so often donned for such retrospectives and looks at the trend and hype through a refreshing political perspective hinging around the New Labour government. It's fascinating to see how the spin doctors went to work on this new youth culture to increase popularity with voters. It was a time of political change, when, after long Conservative rule, people were looking forward to the future, and Cool Britannia filled a cultural hole.

Although it's not unusual for artistic and literary communities to revisit and emulate the ideals of an earlier time (the 18th-century reverence for classical antiquity, for example), the present age has shown an interest in medieval music that's certainly unprecedented–and, on evidence of hundreds of recordings and the work of dozens of performing ensembles, its practitioners certainly are among the most accomplished and knowledgeable musicians and scholars ever known. This excellent recording from the medieval ensemble La Reverdie provides more support to such a claim. Rather than just dig up a bunch of old manuscripts, arrange a few obscure tunes, and dump them onto a program with a suitably poetic title, La Reverdie dug up a bunch of old manuscripts, arranged a few obscure tunes, and intelligently and skillfully organized them into an engaging program that brims with lively, lovely music and imaginative interpretations.

The Arcana recordings by the Italian ensemble La Reverdie approach, in their esoteric beauty, the medieval recordings by the American quartet Anonymous 4. There are, however, great differences. The La Reverdie recordings are not only based on minute scientific research but also on philosophical concepts, these usually being explained in the form of heady intellectual essays printed in the accompanying booklets in four languages. The music itself is eclectic, being carefully selected from manuscripts held in European university libraries.