The Harp Consort, Andrew Lawrence-King - Miracles of Notre-Dame (2005)

There are so many difficulties for performers of Gautier de Coincy. Quite aside from the problems of all monophonic song from the 13th century (whether to use instruments or not, how literally to take the written notes, how much can be improvised and so on), most of the music is demonstrably not by him, but adaptations of wellloved pieces of his time. His main contribution is therefore the poetry. So an important feature of this issue is that the texts are treated with the utmost seriousness: the seven songs that form the core are all sung complete, all treated as coherent poems without gratuitous repetition of sections, all with the words taking absolute primacy in the performance, and all done in ways that makes it quite clear that the performers know exactly what they are singing about. There's something marvellously refreshing in the way they relish the sound of their texts, enunciated with a deliciously hard-edged approach to medieval French.
Around these seven songs, Andrew Lawrence- King has created a frame designed from shorter fragments. Many are instrumental renditions of the melodies, with some particularly remarkable and fascinating performances by Ian Harrison on cornett and shawm, alongside some astonishingly attractive examples of group improvisation.