Fineline Classical's Adieu, naturlic leven mijn (Farewell, my fleshly life) features the Aventure Ensemble for Medieval Music in 14 pieces collected from the Koning Manuscript, a volume from the turn of the sixteenth century housed at the Royal Library in Brussels (ms. II 270). It is a highly curious source; richly illustrated with images of well-to-do individuals in all their finery placed opposite the specter of death and containing lengthy poems advocating the renunciation of wealth and property. Twenty nine of the poems are set with polyphonic music, though only in a maximum of two parts; other pieces appear without music in a separate layer of the book. In realizing the music of this source, Aventure sometimes fleshes out the musical settings through utilizing descant and other practices common to this era. It also varies the material by including a piece from the Buxheim organ book, a work by Alexander Agricola, and by using a piece by Jacob Obrecht to set a text from the Koning Manuscript that lacks music.
Aventure got one thing right -- this volume is the product of a pious community, more typical of societies in Northern Europe where the concept of "fun" was more alien than in the South. While Aventure's realization of the music is loving in its application and true to the spirit of the illustrations, Adieu, naturlic leven mijn requires a lot of patience. Texts are often quite long and the musical phrases connected to them repetitive, and while the added material does vary the program, it is hard to say that it creates a sense of "variety." It is almost more interesting to read the texts in the booklet, with passages as "Death has surprised many; I wait for it at every moment/it pursues me like a hare: of what avail are pleasure and delight? /...I must become ashes for worms" -- than to listen to the music. Nevertheless, it is a highly interesting study, almost as if the old volume on vampires that the aged servant reads in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) were set to music. Aventure Ensemble's Adieu, naturlic leven mijn might well prove engrossing as a background to a bit of late-night reading with no set time to get up in the morning, and the copious notes to this disc may well serve likewise as the reading matter itself.