Seeing the title
Seized by Sweet Desire and then putting on the disc and hearing Notre Dame organum is not the problem here. The boundary between secular and sacred in the Middle Ages was porous in the extreme, and the music to which the Notre Dame style gave birth sometimes even had a mixture of secular and sacred texts. Even the fairly raunchy female trouvère songs included here don't automatically place the music in a realm different from the religious pieces. Nor is it much of an issue that Denmark's all-female vocal group Musica Ficta, under male director
Bo Holten, sings music from Notre Dame cathedral, where polyphony certainly would have been sung by males. Even if the soaring lines of Notre Dame organum are tied more than most music to a specific place, the music does, as
Holten points out, make a refreshing impression with women's voices, and the music of medieval convents is still an unknown enough territory that it's hard to say whether nuns might have known about it or experimented with it. The sound of the album is consistent and fresh, living up to the claim that the group blands "the classical Oxbridge early music ideal with the warmth of the Scandinavian choral sound." Women's voices with a quick, strong vibrato resound in the spaces of St. Paul's Church in Copenhagen, and the sound of the album is consistent from start to finish. That's where the program hits a discordant note; the trouvère songs, delightful as they are, sound oddly anachronistic in a cappella versions, almost as if the music had been turned into Renaissance madrigals. The trouvères, male or female, were bards who sang with instrumental accompaniment. Sophisticated versions of the style with multiple voice parts existed, as presented here, but the music still feels strangely formal when sung this way. That said, this is an intriguing attempt to bring medieval music within the purview of mainstream vocal ensembles.