Ferrara Ensemble, Crawford Young - Corps Femenin: L'Avant-garde de Jean Duc de Berry (2010)

A long-awaited new release of one of the world’s most respected medieval music ensembles, Crawford Young’s Ferrara Ensemble continues its interpretation of late Gothic composers, in the first recording ever of what has been called the Mt. Everest of music notation puzzles - Angelorum psalat of the Codex Chantilly, recently published in a new edition by Crawford Young. A pinnacle of complexity, the Codex Chantilly, c1400, reflects the taste of popes and secular rulers such as Jean, Duc de Berry. These works reflect the unprecedented progress of technology (seen in the development of clocks and music notation); the refinement of art (including the Très Riches Heures of Berry); questions about love and the meaning of life, at the time of the Black Death, devastating earthquakes, the Hundred Years War and the fracture of the Roman Catholic Church. The Ferrara Ensemble has interpreted medieval and Renaissance music since the 1980s, when Crawford Young and Randall Cook were working in the Medieval Department of the Schola Cantorum in Basel. Since then the Ferrara Ensemble has gained cult-status for its readings of Guillaume de Machaut, Walter Frye, Alexander Agricola, and perhaps preeminently, the composers of the French Ars Subtilior period. Critical acclaim has included being nominated as finalists for Gramophone’s Early Music Recording of the Year. Director Crawford Young recently collaborated on the CD of Oswald von Wolkenstein with Andreas Scholl, as director of the ensemble Shield of Harmony.