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GRAMOPHONE (4/2025)
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Hyperion  CDA68430

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Reviewer : David Fallows

This is obviously a red-letter day. The Orlando Consort’s complete songs of Machaut is concluded (lacking only a few monophonic lais): all 11 albums with the same four singers, all beautifully controlled, all perfectly balanced and paced, and – perhaps most important of all – entirely without eccentricities. As always, the Orlandos do everything without any instrumental participation; but I think we are all now agreed that, while that is by no means the only plausible solution, it is at least one thoroughly acceptable approach.

It is not as though there are no better recordings of individual pieces, going back to David Munrow’s Early Music Consort in the 1970s, and including over the years various glorious tracks by Gothic Voices, The Hilliard Ensemble and the Ensemble Musica Nova among many others; but the knowledge that everything is now there on the Orlando set and everything is in place must be reassuring for all potential purchasers, for everybody who has any interest at all in Machaut’s music.

Besides, from the start they have had the help of the team who are editing a new Machaut edition. And that also has its history. The first edition of the music was done by Friedrich Ludwig in the 1920s, a truly spectacular achievement; the second was done by Leo Schrade in the 1950s, sadly under too much pressure from the publishers to get everything done in a short time, so in many ways less good than the Ludwig edition. The new international team, led by Yolanda Plumley, is quite rightly in no hurry, but they have managed to supply new editions for everything in these 11 albums. And they supply new English translations of all the texts, done by R Barton Palmer, also of the new Machaut edition.

Could anyone but Hyperion have backed such a risky project? Probably not, but we must salute the company’s courage and rejoice that – among all the recent shocks and scares in the record industry – it saw the project through to the end.

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