Featured Album February 2025: The Orlando Consort "Machaut: A Lover's Death"

This month, we shine a light on the final album from the celebrated vocal quartet The Orlando Consort. A momentous eleventh release dedicated to the medieval sounds of French composer Guillaume de Machaut (c1300–1377); this time his polyphonic motets are presented. Newly released on Hyperion Records, this is a fitting legacy for an ensemble with an impressive 36 years on the early music scene.

Machaut: A Lover's Death
The Orlando Consort

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR FEBRUARY 2025

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From the artist's press release:

The eleventh and final release in The Orlando Consort's comprehensive Machaut survey easily maintains the standards of its predecessors.

The closing couplet of the final track - 'Their singing will be sublime/ Harmoniously will they render him praise' - might well serve as a motto for the Orlandos' achievement, not only in this album but throughout an illustrious career.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "A Lover's Death":

With this new release The Orlando Consort brings to a close their 11-album project to record all of Machaut’s polyphonic songs and motets, as well as all his monophonic songs. It has been a labour of love for the Orlandos that has done so much to bring Machaut’s music to a wider audience. Hyperion, too, are to be congratulated on their unswerving support of the project.

This latest album matches the high standards of all the previous issues in the series: not only in terms of performance standards, which are invariably of the highest order, but also in respect of scholarship, presentation and recording. Anyone seeking to explore music from the medieval period would do well to turn their attention to Guillaume de Machaut (c1300–1377), one of the most significant musicians of the 14th century. And this new recording offers an excellent pathway into this music.

The 17 items on the new CD include 4 motets that encapsulate the range of Machaut’s art in this genre. Though always brief in duration, they are a learned genre requiring study, knowledge of theory and practice for their deeper meaning to be revealed. Built on fragments of Gregorian chant, they were intended for the appreciation of connoisseurs. ‘Hareu, hareu! Le feu / Helas! ou sera puis confors / Obediens usque ad mortem’ is a fine example, in which the Orlandos tap into Machaut’s contrast between the feelings of a lover’s burning heart and the tenor text which evokes Christ’s obedience until death.

The intensity of human love is explored elsewhere on the disc in settings of Machaut’s lyrical poetry as ballade, rondeau of virelai, all forms that relate to dance models of the composer’s time. Usually written from the male perspective, one of them, ‘Je ne cuit pas’, is a beautiful example from the female viewpoint.

The entire CD is exquisitely performed, with refined and perceptive interpretations of this fascinating repertoire. As The Early Music Shop's Featured Album in February, it will make an unusual Valentine’s Day gift.

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A Lover's Death is available from The Early Music Shop online or in our Snape Maltings showroom.

Click here to order now!