This CD represents a bold attempt to make Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion, ca. 1280), perhaps the first secular music drama in the Western tradition, intelligible to a general modern audience. The English ensemble
Tonus Peregrinus (the name means wandering tone and is taken from a detail of chant theory) combines a scholarly background with a desire to put the fruits of the group's scholarly labors across to nonspecialists. The most unusual detail of this recording is that the play's dialogue is not only included (the manuscripts that preserve the play contain dialogue interspersed with unaccompanied songs) but also translated into English as it goes along. As the listener hears the dialogue section (given in lightface type in the tracklist), English words are heard from singers, followed by the original medieval French from a single narrator. It sounds confusing, but the effect is no more intense for the listener than watching a foreign film and reading the subtitles. The translations are colloquial in the extreme. It's quite a surprise to hear words like "It'll be a great party if you guys come along," or even "I'm a complete fool to waste time on this bitch," coming to us across seven centuries, but of course medieval culture had a down-to-earth side to go with its mystical, numerological aspects. De la Halle's songs (listed in boldface in the tracklist) are performed with light, improvisatory accompaniment and translated in the booklet.
The result is surely the first Jeu de Robin et Marion that can be listened to by glancing at the booklet rather than keeping one's eyes glued to it. The play emerges as a fairly entertaining pastoral romance, complete with trash talk, fart jokes, romantic misunderstandings, and many of the other appurtenances of comedy as we know it today. The small instrumental group works well, and the musicians convincingly inflect de la Halle's sparse songs in the direction of romance as required.
The remainder of the music on the disc consists of further compositions by Adam de la Halle: polyphonic motets and rondeaux that conclude sections of the drama. These are given by title in lightface in the tracklist, with their titles preceded by their genre (Rondeau or Motet), plus a number. Some of them appear to be related to the action, but it's hard to tell -- texts are not given for these. Despite the uncertainty over the functions of these pieces, this is the performance of Le jeu de Robin et Marion to choose if you have a general curiosity about the work. The performance gives the play the charming directness and earthiness one sometimes finds in medieval art.