Celebrated in life as the greatest poet-composer of the 14th century, Guillaume de Machaut is still remembered for his influential motets, rondeaux, ballades, and virelais, marking the culmination of the ars nova in late-medieval France. Yet his masterpiece was a sacred work, the Messe de Nostre Dame, which was the first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer, and which anticipated the later cyclic masses of Josquin des Prez and others. This recording by Antoine Guerber and Diabolus in Musica ...
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Celebrated in life as the greatest poet-composer of the 14th century, Guillaume de Machaut is still remembered for his influential motets, rondeaux, ballades, and virelais, marking the culmination of the ars nova in late-medieval France. Yet his masterpiece was a sacred work, the Messe de Nostre Dame, which was the first complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer, and which anticipated the later cyclic masses of Josquin des Prez and others. This recording by Antoine Guerber and Diabolus in Musica presents Machaut's movements of the mass -- Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei -- interlaced with chants devoted to the Virgin Mary, in keeping with the intended use of this mass for Marian devotions. The rich sound of the low-register male ensemble, comprised of tenors Raphaël Boulay and Olivier Germond, baritones Éric Lavoipierre and Jean-Paul Rigaud, bass-baritones Geoffroy Buffière, Christophe Grapperson, and Emmanuel Vistorky, and bass Philippe Roche, gives the mass...
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