The music of medieval Italy is less familiar than that of France in the same era, and it's quite different in style from the complex art of Machaut and his predecessors. So any recording that gives listeners a taste of Italian genres is welcome. Christo è nato offers examples of a praise song type called the lauda, most of them on texts having to do with the nativity. These pieces, drawn from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, date from the late twelfth century. They are incompletely notated; what survives is a single line of notation, but improvised rhythmic and/or polyphonic treatments may have occurred. The mood of the music, insofar as we can determine it, seems to have been devotional and direct; texts are in Italian and Latin. A few more complex, French-influenced pieces by Johannes Ciconia and his contemporaries are added; these date from over a century later, so the contrast they form with the lauda-type works is to some degree a misleading one.
Certainly this kind of repertory leaves room for and even demands imaginative interpretation from performers;
Sequentia, in its recordings of music of this era, offers fine examples of treatments that are rooted in historical research yet make modern musical sense.
Trefoil, a new American trio, tries to follow a similar approach, with varying success. The group members perform the laude in various ways, sometimes without instruments and sometimes with harp, lute, psaltery, and/or percussion; they improvise added voice parts on some pieces and not others; they perform some pieces in strict rhythms, while in others they "opt for an unmeasured delivery that allows the soloists to sing with a maximum amount of rhetorical freedom." The vocalists are two countertenors,
Drew Minter and Mark Rimple, and a soprano, Marcia Young.
Minter in particular is a major vocal talent, and many pieces on the album are carried by his power and musicality. In places, though, the disc has a see-what-sticks feel rather than communicating a sense of being carefully shaped from beginning to end. The decision to open with a Ciconia mass movement is questionable, for it is not of a piece with the rest of the music on the disc.
Texts are given only in paraphrase form in the booklet, but the hearer is directed to a website that gives full translations -- a desirable solution in a low-budget situation.