Anne Azema, Joel Cohen, Camerata Mediterranea - Troubadour Songs (2011)

‘What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.

The dominant subject matter of the first two programmes, Lo Gai Saber and Le Fou sur le Pont, is worldly love, its joys and its sorrows. Much of what the listener may encounter here may resonate very strongly within his or her mind and heart. This is, in part, because such strong feelings about romance and sex are, in a sense, timeless. But the resonance is also due, in large part, to the fact that it is the troubadours who first set out, in the West, the ethic of man–woman relationships that influences our behaviour to the present day.

What is less known and appreciated about the troubadours is that many of their works do indeed deal, directly, with religion, and with the destiny of man, and often in a powerful and compelling way. The third CD in this series, Provence Mystique — along with some of the tracks of Lo Gai Saber — groups some of these songs and texts, together with other, church-related works of southern Europe, in order to compose a picture of the deeply felt spirituality of that epoch. The listener is bound to note the extent to which the religiously oriented works are bound up with, and interdependent with, the secular love songs. The naive faith of certain spiritually oriented songs contrasts with the pessimism and skepticism of others: traits of character and culture still very much present in the Provencal/Occitan/southern French civilization of our own time.

By reuniting these recordings in a single box, we hope to generate some new insights, understandings, and pleasures. Heard individually, these medieval miniatures, both sacred and secular, are a constant source of energy and delight. Experienced as an interrelated group, these songs of worldly love, and of yearning for the divine, create a dense, intense microcosm of Mediterranean passion and desire: a universe that still calls to us strongly, across the centuries.’ -- Joel Cohen - Aniane, France, June 2010