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Editorial Reviews

This disc, originally released in 1992, is part of a series of three covering French music of the fourteenth century. Several of the singers and players in director Christopher Page's Gothic Voices have gone on to careers of their own, and in general the performances sound as strong as they did when they first appeared. At the budget price of the Helios line, The Study of Love is a bargain. This disc covers music from the later part of the century, beginning with Machaut and examining some of the often anonymous music that followed his example. The title is clever, for it captures the combination of gloomy courtly-love sentiment ("your fine face and your sweet look . . . make me taste so much bliss that I can wish for nothing other than that my torment should continue") and complex manipulation of formula. On the cover is St. Jerome in his study, cracking open a book (although one wonders why he is holding it sideways). The late fourteenth century was a time of extreme musical complexity, and the performers succeed both in clarifying the structures and rhythms and in laying out how the complexity evolved. The Machaut pieces are well chosen, including not only polyphonic songs in the intricate fixed forms but also some less commonly heard monophonic songs, beautifully rendered and carrying complexities of their own (sample the way alto Margaret Philpot lingers on the web of internal rhymes in "Dame, je vueil endurer," track 20). Some of the later music can often seem just bizarre in performance, but the Gothic Voices pair the strangeness of a piece like Solage's "La basile" ("It is the nature of the basilisk to kill immediately all those whom it sees") with a sensuous approach emphasizing not only the occasional sharp dissonance, but also the sweetness of the harmonies. Tempos are moderate, and accompaniments are sparse (a lute or medieval harp) or altogether absent. Page makes a special brief for the Gloria (track 16), a mass movement by an apparently French composer named Pycard or Picard (his music is found only in an English manuscript), and the group hangs together in the dizzying rhythmic subdivisions of this work. The concise but useful notes by Page appear in English, French, and German, but the song texts are in English and French only. In all, this disc illuminates a period of music history that is more often simply noted than really appreciated. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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