The cover of this "inspection of love" suggests one of the many collections of courtly love songs that flowered in the late medieval period. But actually the contents are something different and, as with all the various discs by the ensemble
La Reverdie, quite intellectually challenging. In fact, the group almost completely avoids the conventional type of lyric depicting a knight hopelessly devoted to an unattainable lady; the only one included, Johannes Simon Hasprois' Ma douce amour (track 11), is brought on board in order to exemplify "masterful musical invention, free at last from any textual trammel," the text having retreated to "poetic barrenness." Instead, the group performs works falling under a broader definition of love, one that might encompass sacred pieces about Mary and also raunchy poems like Oswald von Wolkenstein's Ain graserin (track 17) and Magister Piero's Con dolce brama (track 15), both splendid and little-heard examples of the art of medieval sexual double entendre. (The drawing on the cover of the booklet, depicting an episode from the Roman de la Rose, also fits into this theme.) What holds this together in the view of annotator and group leader Ella de Mircovich (or de Mircovich -- the name, strangely, varies across discs in the series), drawing on the ideas of earlier medievalists, is that love, during the medieval period, formed a sort of rival ideology to scholastic Christianity, permeating even sacred discourse while also drawing on what de Mircovich calls pre-Christian influences from the classical or the Germanic worlds. This is an intriguing way to look at the Carmina Burana poems, one excerpt of which is included here, and indeed the texts of the entire medieval period. The music mostly consists of pieces from the thirteenth century, with several French pieces that have multiple texts. These are tough pieces to put across, and while there is doubtless room for disagreement with de Mircovich's ideas, those ideas provide an interesting framework on which to hang this rather difficult music. The performances are straightforward, with voices accompanied by a small group of harps, lutes, and flutes; this is a recording where the music, to an extent, serves the ideas involved rather than vice versa. It will be of most interest to those already fascinated by medieval culture, but for them it will be a sure-fire conversation starter. The booklet essay appears in Italian, French, German, and English; the texts are also translated into those languages, but they appear sequentially, not in parallel.