GUILLAUME MACHAUT: Le Remede de Fortune – Marc Mauillon, voice/ Vivabiancaluna Biffi, voice and viol/ Angelique Mauillon, Gothic harp/ Pierre Hamon, flutes and percussion/ Serge Goubioud, voice/ Emmanuel Vistorky, voice – Eloquentia 0918 (2 CDs), 88:18 **** [Distr. by Harmonia mundi]:
Machaut’s The Cure of Ill Fortune is something that he called a “treatise” – actually a love story in courtly style combined with a treatise based on Boethius and even Petrarch (his Consolation of Philosophy). Machaut, in virtuosic fashion, makes use of all the known song forms of his time, from rondeau to ballade to virelai. The summary (thanks to Wikipedia) is simply this: The narrator is asked by his lady if the poem she has found is by him; the narrator flees from her and comes to a garden where "Hope" consoles him and teaches him how to be a good lover; he returns to his lady.
The piece is operatic in length, dealing with love and fidelity, and the varied parts are sung by singers that take multiple roles, not always personages but sometimes things like “Hope”. Sometimes one voice sings multiple parts as well. All of the musicians, both voices and instrumentalists, are paramount to the success of the work, and must continually be aware of keeping the long passages colorful and dramatically effective without being boring. For the most part they succeed.
Machaut has been called the “last great poet who was also a composer”, and his work was admired greatly even by one as noted as Chaucer. Most of his over-400 poems were meant to be recited, not sung. But many of the texts dealing with courtly love were deemed worthy to be set by the composer/poet, and these, along with his Mass of Our Lady places him at the pinnacle of fourteenth century composers.
I liked this performance; it is the first time I have actually heard this work, and I am not sure that this might be the first recording. If so, it is a worthy one. With a composer like Machaut, and the fact that we know so little about performing traditions of his day, it is always interesting to get different takes on the music, especially the secular works. But this one is done very well in close and resonant sound, guaranteed to get your Machaut fix on for quite some time. Singing and playing are first rate.
— Steven Ritter
