TY - JOUR
AU - Losseff, Nicky
AB - Nevel uses instruments at all, so adept are his singers at centrate the highly charged, devotional atmosphere, which mimicking all woody and reedy sounds. The purely instru- even filters through the more showy, polyphonic items. mental pieces, with their ill-conceived registral doublings, Anonymous 4 has now recorded a sizeable chunk of the are surely the least convincing of the collection. Then there English polyphonic repertory (too often seen as the poor is the question of ornamentation: Van Nevel takes his cue relation of Notre Dame), which is useful in itself, not least from the text of one of the manuscript's ballades to justify as a teaching tool. As usual, the conductus are perfect—the slowed-down trills and wide vibrato on certain pitches. quality of sound almost lapidary yet the phrases given The trouble is that the verse in question makes no such direction through a real grasp of the poem's meaning. It stipulations. To sing 'en maniere lie' is to sing merrily, not is this direct connection between poetic meaning and 'in a legato manner'; and to employ 'fleuretis' certainly musical interpretation in polyphonic items which most implies ornaments of some sort, but nothing as specific as separates Anonymous 4's 
TI - Anonymous 4, an ensemble apart
JF - Early Music
DO - 10.1093/earlyj/XXIV.1.176-a
DA - 1996-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/anonymous-4-an-ensemble-apart-YSNpN0tFuQ
SP - 176-a
EP - 176
VL - XXIV
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -