Barnes & Noble
Thanks to the pioneering work of groups like Anonymous 4 and the Hilliard Ensemble -- to name just two -- we've gotten used to the idea that the unaccompanied vocal music of the Middle Ages can be as beautiful as anything ever composed, but it's still easy to be awestruck by the exquisite sounds made by the women of Trio Mediaeval. On Stella Maris, their third release for ECM -- a label whose trademark acoustic resonance fits the Trio like a glove -- they reprise their approach of combining old with new: Halfway through, the disc jumps from the 13th century to the 21st. That leap isn't as jarring as it might sound, however, and unless you are following along closely it might take a while to realize that the Missa Lumen de Lumine wasn't written by an anonymous friar or abbot but rather by young Korean composer Sungji Hong. Dedicated to the Trio, Hong's radiant Mass does explore some harmonies and vocal colors that would have been foreign to the composers of many centuries past, yet its direct expressive aim and contemplative clarity make it an eloquent complement to early sacred music. As for the first half of Stella Maris, it offers a well-chosen variety of French and English works, most in the form of conductus (featuring a strong rhythmic component rather than chant-like freedom). Some are florid, some are simple, some are almost architectural in their grandeur, but Trio Mediaeval illuminates them all with a vocal purity and intensity that brightly outshines the current competition. Scott Paulin
All Music Guide
Trio Mediaeval is a group of three women from Norway who sing unaccompanied harmonies using medieval polyphony as a point of departure. Even given that we can never really know what 800-year-old music sounded like in its own time, it can be said that they remake medieval pieces according to their own wishes rather than researching their original sound worlds. Their harmony singing is striking. It's highly expressive, with a variety of subtle vocal moves enlivening what is basically an austere musical vocabulary; they apply vibrato at times, and they relax the tempo slightly in order to bring out the pungent dissonances that pass by from time to time in medieval polyphony, with its predominantly linear conception. Stella Maris presents six examples of the freely composed conductus genre that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one unique multitextual English piece ("Dou way Robin/Sancta Mater"), and "Missa Lumen de Lumine," a Mass Ordinary setting by contemporary Korean composer Sungji Hong.
Performances of medieval music, perhaps even more than those of music from later periods, are a matter of taste, with reactions depending partly on what the listener hopes to get out of the music. Those who find a quality of spiritual ecstasy in medieval polyphony and its sense of discovery of new sounds will likely find Trio Mediaeval's performances revelatory. They argue that it makes sense to have women sing this music even though it originated in all-male settings, and they're right -- even if women did not sing these particular pieces, innovative music, some of it polyphonic, originated in medieval convents. Female performers have as much right to the music as anyone else. However, listeners who are really trying to take themselves back to medieval times may feel that Trio Mediaeval has a surfeit of style and a deficit of substance. Such listeners will notice that texts are given only in Latin in the liner notes, and it's hard to begin to understand medieval music unless one knows what is being sung about.
Regardless of one's tastes, the inclusion of Hong's "Missa Lumen di Lumine" is welcome. Written especially for Trio Mediaeval, the mass is not a neo-medieval piece but includes a variety of references to medieval styles: parallel harmonies, and syncopated rhythms of the sort found in Machaut's mass, for instance. Even within the restrictions imposed by the act of writing for three unaccompanied women's voices, Hong responds to the texts of the Mass Ordinary in amazingly flexible ways. Pictorial effects are present in abundance but are always subtly done; consider the mood of quiet confidence exuded by the music for Christ's resurrection in the Credo, so different from the usual ascending scales attached to the words "Et resurrexit." Hong uses register and spacing among the voices to marvelous effect. Stella Maris thus introduces a major new work that could well be taken up by other female vocal ensembles. ECM's sound engineering shines in this minimal setting. James Manheim
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© 2009 All Media Guide, LLC