The Orlando Consort - Guillaume de Machaut: The Dart of Love (2015)

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The Orlando Consort - Guillaume de Machaut: The Dart of Love (2015)

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This is the second recording of Machaut's music by the all-male Orlando Consort (countertenor on top), and their way with Machaut is excellent. They have a nice, light tone in the secular pieces that contrasts with the more severe Gothic Voices, and they convey the weighty, ceremonial quality of the big motets. Machaut goes far enough back that nobody can be sure of how it sounded (and the graphics for this all-vocal album show a painting including instruments), but if you like the unaccompanied approach, this will do as well as anything for putting the basic sound of Machaut in your head. And "basic," in the best way, describes this album in another respect as well: the booklet notes by Anne Stone (given in English and French) give the most complete, and more importantly most enthusiastic, introduction one could ask for in a few pages to Machaut's stylistic world. While so many recordings and writings treat the multiple texts in Machaut, for example, as a medieval eccentricity and an annoyance, Stone shows how the texts, even sacred and secular ones together, comment on and reinforce each other, and are reinforced by the music. The album includes examples of most of the major Machaut genres: motet, rondeau, ballade, and virelai, missing only the monophonic lai (whose world is indeed hard to put across in a few pieces). For a library-cornerstone Machaut album, you would be hard pressed to do better than this.

Review by James Manheim, Allmusic.com

This second Machaut recording by The Orlando Consort for Hyperion seems to me a return to their best form. Much of the time the musical and textual argument puts the spotlight on the consort’s younger members, the countertenor Matthew Venner and the higher tenor Mark Dobel (the lower parts being sung but not texted). Their agility and Venner’s clear, well-modulated timbre and admirable control of phrasing play no small part in The Orlandos’ rejuvenation: they appear to good effect in the consecutive tracks Quant en moy and S’Amours ne fait. The texts, which in Machaut’s case are particularly worth absorbing, are also more intelligible here than has sometimes been the case.

The programme is nicely varied in mood and scoring, ranging from four-voice ballades and motets to a single-voice virelai, and every combination in between. It also includes a higher proportion of pieces already present in the discography than the previous instalment (11/13), and in these pieces The Orlandos either find something new to say or say it particularly well (try Rose, lis, for example, or the melancholy Dame, je suis cils, which Gothic Voices had made their own, recording it not once but twice). Of those pieces new to the discography I’d single out the humorous hunter’s canon Se je chant mains by Machaut’s contemporary, Denis Le Grant, whose calls and barks are nicely suggested without the music descending into slapstick. A thoughtful essay by Anne Stone makes audible sense of the many connections between the pieces on this valuable, impressive recording.

Review by Fabrice Fitch, Gramophone

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The Orlando Consort - Guillaume de Machaut: The Dart of Love (2015)

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The Orlando Consort - Guillaume de Machaut: The Dart of Love (2015)

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The Orlando Consort - Guillaume de Machaut: The Dart of Love (2015)

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