The blend between the voices is finely controlled, the tone mellow and the tuning spectacularly accurate, giving rise to an organ-like sonority that is genuinely thrilling,” wrote Gramophone magazine, praising the Hilliard Ensemble’s four singers, who excelled in an extraordinary variety of music over a 40-year career. This seven-CD collection extends from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, offering music by composers from England, France, Flanders and Germany.

SEON (Studio Erichson) is a period music label by the legendary producer Wolf Erichson. Erichson founded the label in 1969 as one of the first labels dedicated only to authentic music. The recordings were made with the best available recording techniques of the time and still deliver a high quality product in line with today's standards. This special boxset offers all SEON CD reissues from the late 90s on 85 CDs in a limited edition boxset.

Guillaume Dufay was undoubtedly the greatest musician of the fifteenth century. The Missa Se la Face ay Pale is the first of the four Great Masses of his maturity. While ushering in the Renaissance period, this work represents a culmination in the music of the Middle Ages.

Guillaume Dufay is one of the key representatives of the French musical genius. His masterful work is a comprehensive and brilliant apotheosis of the middle ages. During his long career, the master from Cambrai gave us not only an impressive series of motets and masses, but also more than 80 profane songs, jems of melodic, rhythmic and poetic creativity. These small masterpieces show extreme refinement and an extraordinary command of counterpoint. Whatever the form, ballad, rondeau, bergerette or motet-song, the expression remains surprisingly natural and exquisitely simple. Most of these songs hail lightness of mind, joy, optimism, modestly restrained amorous pleasure, though some are melancholic or dwell on more austere feelings.

Musical Games of the Renaissance: A Century of Musical Ingenuity, 1410-1510,” began as a musical complement to an exhibition of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century hand-painted playing cards mounted at The Met Cloisters in early 2016. On February 21 of that year, Pomerium first presented a public performance at The Cloisters of a program that included all the works recorded here. The performance was in the Fuentideña Chapel, which adjoins the room in which the playing cards were exhibited. The juxtaposition of cards and music made clear that Renaissance society’s fascination with games—well known from fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century images of people playing cards, dice, and chess—also extended to musical composition.

Gothic Voices’ eagerly awaited new album features music from The Old Hall Manuscript: a wonderful collection of classy compositions from late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century England. It embodies the English ‘flavour’ of music of the time, with its smooth melodies and sweet harmonies, irresistible to Franco-Flemish composers writing a generation or so later, and known by them as the ‘Contenance Angloise’. This highly expressive and quirky music, ranging in atmosphere from gently suave strains to high-octane cascades of sound, benefits from the gorgeous acoustics of Boxgrove Priory.

The works of the 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay are often considered to be where medieval music ends and Renaissance music begins. Yet Dufay sounds quite different from later, better-known Renaissance composers such as Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin: Dufay's music is less densely scored, with more stratified voice ranges, very complex rhythms, and a somewhat neutral emotional affect. Pomerium, a New York-based choir with extensive experience in Dufay, presents here one of the composer's largest works: a setting of both the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) and the propers (texts specific to the occasion) of the Mass for the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. Pomerium's polished performance makes this a fine addition to the Dufay discography.

The music of Guillaume Dufay is often said to lie on the boundary between medieval and Renaissance. It is complex in the manner of medieval polyphony, sometimes with multiple texts in different languages, and intricate rhyme schemes. Yet, in its evocative use of vertical sonority and its original texts in the songs, it approaches a manner of text-setting that you can recognize as modern. His chansons are not often recorded, so this release of 18 chansons from the Orlando Consort would be welcome on general principles; it has virtues considerably beyond that.

This is one of the most beautiful early music discs in the catalog–equally attributable to the music and to the perfectly tuned and blended voices, whose timbres couldn't be more appealing to the ear or more appropriate to the style of the repertoire. The very first track–a charming, gentle, hopeful little piece by Dufay, "Bon jour, bon mois, bon an"–leads us easily into the heart and spirit of this well-conceived program, which seeks to duplicate in music the expressive power and visual beauty of the richly illustrated Books of Hours–lovingly created volumes that were a cherished fixture of religious devotional practice in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Among the composers represented are Dufay, Desprez, Busnoys, Dunstaple, and Ockeghem. Put this at the top of your list.

The cube made with matches which appears on the cover of this disc, showing on flames in the inside of the digipak and afterwards completely burnt, plays with the ideas that inspire this dazzling recording: the four ways to the knowledge of numbers through the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), which are expressed through something as ephemeral assound, where also the unexpected and the emotion of the moment take place.

Music appreciation textbooks and timelines in magazines often name Guillaume Dufay as the first great composer of the European Renaissance, but one might equally call him the last great composer of the Middle Ages. This disc presents all 13 of Dufay's isorhythmic motets–the final masterpieces of a very medieval-minded genre. During the Middle Ages, music was considered a science (just like mathematics), and isorhythmic motets are constructed according to strict arithmetical principles. In addition, each voice generally has a different text, while the fundamental voice (called the tenor) usually has no text at all and is often (as here) performed by instruments.

What did it mean for Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397-1474), chameleon-like expert in every musical genre of his day, to compose four settings of the Mass Ordinary toward the end of his life? Looking back from the vantage point of the next generation, when the polyphonic mass reigned supreme, it might be tempting to interpret these works as a self-conscious summa of Du Fay’s career – an achievement akin to Haydn’s London Symphonies or Beethoven’s late string quartets. On a purely musical level these comparisons are apt. Each mass stakes out unique musical terrain; they are often strikingly experimental; and the entire set is shimmeringly beautiful from beginning to end, revealing a composer at the height of his powers.