Editorial Reviews

Cantate's God sy gelovet features the Schola und Ensemble devotio moderna, a period vocal group devoted to interpreting music sources found in the medieval convent of Luneberg in Northern Germany. Despite the enormous amount of interest in Hildegard von Bingen since her rediscovery in the 1970s, surviving repertoire located in medieval convents not dispersed during the late eighteenth century, or destroyed in World War II, remains little known; only in 2008 did the University of Göttingen institute a comprehensive, comparative study of the 82 medieval manuscripts found in Saxon, South German, convents. At the Luneberg convent in the North, the library is blessed with a small but significant number of manuscripts including two sources for the complete liturgy for the Coronation of Nuns. A selection of these pieces, arranged into a roughly liturgical contextual relationship, is presented on God sy gelovet.

The choir of nuns sings well and with a fair amount of transparency; a male reciter is heard in the opening Admission to the Convent section, but not afterward. Although the group comes well equipped with instruments they hardly use them, and a lot of the time the musicians discreetly double the monophonic chant melodies or combine with singers in a drone; elsewhere, fauxbourdon is used to harmonize some sections of chant, but only among the voices. It is carefully done, and the singing is suitably angelic, but the disc is not without some boring spots; listening in sizable segments, rather than straight through, can help alleviate that problem. There is also a little bell in use that gets a bit too much play in the early going, but ultimately it is used more sparingly. Overall, this is very pleasant to listen to; the music was meant for devotions and not as entertainment, and in this scrupulously researched, no-nonsense performance, that aspect of it comes across as it should with no extra whistles attached...okay, there is the one bell. Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide

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