Musique sacrée de la Cathédrale Notre-Dame

Pérotin - Léonin

Released on 7/1/05 by Naxos
Main artists: Tonus Peregrinus Antony Pitts
Genre: Vocal Music (Secular and Sacred)

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Tonus Peregrinus is a group of expert singers who come together once in awhile to attack a special project, this one being Léonin/Pérotin: Sacred Music from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Naxos' early music series. Any attempt to perform or record twelfth century polyphony requires some ingenuity in preparing a text that remains musical, yet makes liturgical sense: the well-known manuscript sources for polyphonic Notre Dame Repertoire do not contain the whole prescription for performance. Tonus Peregrinus, under the direction of Antony Pitts, weaves together related strands of monophonic chant, two- and four-part textures, and information gleaned from teaching manuals of the time to create a wholly satisfactory blend of what sources tell us about this temporally remote musical genre. Tonus Peregrinus emphasizes the importance of skilled solo singers in this literature by inaugurating the disc with an outstanding rendering of Perotin's monophonic conductus setting of Beata viscera, sung magnificently by Rebecca Hickey. In these realizations, the solo voice is placed in the foreground, except in unison plainchant sections, and this approach applies to much of the disc, with an amazing exception in the realization of music from the Scolica enchiriadis. This ninth century manuscript, the oldest part-music in existence, doesn't contain any specific musical works, but it includes various recipes as to how to harmonize pre-existing monophonic chant sources. Tonus Peregrinus marries these principles to a setting of Psalm 115, Non nobis domine, and in some places the voices seem to lift into the stratosphere -- it is a truly "heavenly effect" that has to be heard to be believed. In works by Léonin and Pérotin, the Organum travels at the same speed as the plainchant, a radically different approach from virtually all other choirs, which tend to perform the Organum at a faster clip as opposed to the chant. It makes a huge difference in the sound of the composition, and makes total sense in terms of realizing this style. There is no "right" way to perform Notre Dame Organa. All recorded incarnations of this music have to be considered legitimate, at least until new information comes along that tends to disqualify some aspect of a given performance style. Nevertheless, the manifestation of the Organa in Leonin/Perotin: Sacred Music from Notre-Dame Cathedral is redolent with the atmosphere we know from the books, architecture, and painting of that distant time, and is one of the very best recorded options ever made for this music.
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Musique sacrée de la Cathédrale Notre-Dame

Tonus Peregrinus

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Beata viscera (monophonic conductus) (Pérotin)

Beata viscera (monophonic conductus)

00:06:13

Perotin, Composer - Tonus Peregrinus, Choir, MainArtist - Antony Pitts, Conductor

Viderunt omnes (plainchant) (Anonyme)

Viderunt omnes (plainchant)

00:02:15

Anonymous, Composer - Tonus Peregrinus, Choir, MainArtist - Antony Pitts, Conductor

Viderunt omnes No. 1 (Léonin)

Viderunt omnes... (2-part organum)

00:02:09