Remede de fortune

"La remède de fortune ("Fortune's remedy", also meaning "the makeshift cure") is a rambling, four-thousand-word narrative love poem which contains seven songs, each in a different form. It has been dated sometime after 1345. There are a Lai, Ballade, Baladelle, Rondeau and Virelai, which were common at the time, plus a Chant royal, Machaut's only example, and a Complainte. The first track is Ci commence ("Here begins") which Scott Metcalfe beautifully reads in French ... You will notice that we have more than seven tracks. The performers fill the programme out with other appropriate pieces ... If I had to name one wonderful thing about the singing, it would be the carefully aligned medieval French vowels ... This is one of the most beautifully and lavishly made discs that has ever come my way".

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"Several difficulties arise in recording Machaut's 'Remede de Fortune'. The first is that it is basically a narrative, over 4000 lines long. Here the solution is to begin with a couple of minutes from the beginning of the poem, beautifully spoken in medieval French by Scott Metcalfe; after that, bits of the story are told between the songs ... The next difficulty is that of the seven musical inserts, which are the point of the recording, the first two are enormously long ... They butcher it substantially to bring it down to about half its original length; and they divide the singing between three singers ... This is in fact a live recording from two concerts given in 2019; and it probably works better as a concert than on disc".

"Vurdering: Diapason d'or".