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Myth, Sallust tells us, is the relation of ‘things that never happened, but always are’. Ever since the fourteenth century, music has drunk deep from the source of myths. When composers were not dealing with sacred history, with the great morality tales of Christ, they turned to myth as to a great art and a matchless repertory of exemplary stories. Metamorfosi Trecento is a musical exploration of myths and of the polyphony of the late Middle Ages. The ancient myths, foremost among them Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and their medieval transpositions are extremely present in the repertory of the Ars Nova: Narcissus lost on a fatal voyage, the stories of Daphne’s dream, Philomela, the myth of Orpheus, Callisto. The lutenist Michele Pasotti and the singers and instrumentalists (fiddle, recorder, clavicymbalum, Gothic harp etc.) of the ensemble he founded in 2005, La Fonte Musica, bring these wondrous tales back to life with a beauty and artistry we wished to share with you.

At first glance, Aeon's two-CD set Johannes Ockeghem: Missa Cuiusvis Toni seems like it has to be the longest recording of a renaissance mass in the history of mankind, and one wonders what wealth of additional material would be in play to stretch a single mass setting out to fill two discs. A quick explanation would be that Lucien Kandel's Ensemble Musica Nova is a group that specializes in divining hidden extended works from the mostly relatively short pieces in medieval and renaissance sources. A good example is the disc-long exploration of Dufay's motet Flos florum for Zig Zag Territories, which places the work in the context of several other related pieces owing to a shared use of cantus firmus. In this instance, not one Ockeghem mass is heard, but four; however, the same source work is used for all. Missa Cuiusvis Toni (Mass in All of the Tones) has some "puzzle" notation elements that introduce variant ideas into the mass setting when sung on differing church modes. Here it is heard on the tones of "ré," "fa," "mi," and "sol"; each mass takes roughly 30 minutes to perform, and each one is significantly different from the next. Ockeghem's motet Intermerata Dei Mater is also included, for good measure, as filler on the second disc.A striking feature of this disc is that the masses are performed outside of a liturgical context. One would have to go back quite some time to find a major early music group performing a renaissance mass without its usual framing material; incipits, propers, chant sections, what have you. As long ago as 1970s musicologist Denis Stevens was saying that early masses should never be done without some relation to the liturgy, and this has become for the most part the rule. However, a full liturgical context within this case for all four masses would probably require four discs rather than two, and would tend to obscure the important similarities between these realizations. The very act of figuring out Ockeghem's cryptic puzzle notation is in itself a thing of wonder, but it wouldn't mean much if the performances were as smooth and pristine as they are; Ensemble Musica Nova's sound is well intoned, fluid, and suitably devotional. If one were to go back to the days when ensembles sang masses straight out of the book with no incipits, one would note a tendency for such groups to sing the music considerably faster and more recklessly. By comparison, nothing about Ensemble Musica Nova's performance of these works is antiquated. They are both effortless and pure, and Aeon's sound is warm and well suited to the program at hand.© TiVo

"...JUVENTUDE flirts with today's hip lounge-chill scene without losing relation with Brazil's great musical heritage..."© TiVo

Students and others who set themselves to the task of understanding the initially elusive musical language of the Renaissance often learn about Dufay and the cantus firmus -- the preexisting chant or song around which a mass was built -- and about his mathematically dizzying isorhythmic motet Nuper rosarum flores. The more intimate sacred motet, directly expressive of its text, seems to be more the province of Josquin Desprez, two generations later; Dufay's motets, many of which address Mary, are rather tough going for the newcomer. They are not closely tied to the text like the motets of Josquin, and even those that have a cantus firmus don't feature it as an obvious unifying device the way Dufay's masses do.This superb French disc is the one that clarifies what Dufay's motets are all about. This may not knock Beethoven and Andrea Bocelli off the top of the classical charts, but anyone with an interest in the rather arcane musical language of the early Flemish-Italian Renaissance, or even in the art of the period, should add this disc to his or her library. The Ensemble Musica Nova strives for absolute clarity of texture. It sings a cappella (as Dufay himself is thought to have preferred), with text added to the untexted lower parts for greater intelligibility. The group sings precisely but in a relaxed fashion that gets across the crucial sense of when a line of the polyphony is being ornamented by the composer -- the sense of expression in Dufay's music is very much bound up with ornament and rhythm, which most performances don't communicate very well. The "flowers" referred to in the texts -- Mary, the city of Florence -- seem almost to burst from the music, which may seem remarkable to anyone who has sat through a lot of dull Dufay performances, but sample the first or the third track. (English text translations in the booklet do not, unfortunately, run parallel with the Latin and French, but follow them at the end.) The booklet notes are rather dense, not always smoothly translated ("to sing of death enabled musicians and poets to suggest a filiation"?) and confusingly divided into two separate essays, one dealing with the allusive quality of Dufay's texts and the other delving into musical structure and into what Dufay's audiences would have listened for in the two types of motets represented here, the motet with cantus firmus and the freely composed "song motet." The notes may be a hard slog for those without some previous knowledge of the subject, but effort expended in understanding them will bring these pieces alive and deepen the listener's perception of Dufay as the composer, perhaps more than any other, who lay right at the emergence of the idea of individual musical expression that is taken for granted today. The disc can also be appreciated for its sensuous surfaces alone, and Mornant church where the music was recorded could not have been more appropriate to the performers' aims. An essential choice for libraries -- the disc really furnishes enough material for an upper-level or graduate class all by itself -- or for Renaissance collections.© TiVo