Trio Mediaeval is an Oslo-based ensemble of three Scandinavian sopranos, Anna Maria Friman from Sweden and Norwegians Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum. As the group’s name implies, the focus is on the repertoire of the Middle Ages, both plainchant and counterpoint. With (very) occasional exceptions they sing without accompaniment and without vibrato. What they do sing with is a keen sense of the intonation of their selected period and crystalline clarity.
Later this month they will conduct a short tour of North America in conjunction with the release of their new ECM New Series CD, A Worcester Ladymass, on March 15. This is a reconstruction of a thirteenth-century votive Mass to the Virgin Mary, based on individual pages and fragments of manuscripts from a Benedictine Abbey in the English Midlands. The compilation of an integrated composition from these fragmented sources is the work of their music editor, Nicky Losseff.
Losseff provided two pages about the nature of her work for the booklet accompanying the CD, and her contribution is pretty much the only part of this offering with which I would take issue. However, my complaint is not that she wrote too much about musicological details that would not interest many listeners. Quite the contrary: I wish she had written more!
The issue is that there are so many qualities that make the music of this period decidedly different from the repertoire familiar to most listeners. Indeed, medieval music differs significantly even from the music that would follow it during the Renaissance period. Thus, the interested listener new to the repertoire would benefit from a bit more information about how texts were set (such as the singing of different texts simultaneously in motets), different approaches to counterpoint, and even the relations between plainchant and polyphony. None of this would necessarily have to be discussed in any great detail; but a few words about the basic structure of each of the eighteen tracks would have been helpful to newcomers (and those, like myself, who have been away from this repertoire for decades)!
I should also explain that the CD itself consists of twenty tracks. It turns out that no fragments were available for two of the portions of the Mass, the Credo and the Benedicamus Domino. Trio Mediaeval invited Gavin Bryars to compose settings for these texts. His results interface excellently with the spirit of the surrounding sections, even if he did not always strictly follow the grammatical constraints of the original sources.
Sadly, Trio Mediaeval’s visit to North America will be a brief one. It begins with a performance in St. Anne’s Church in Toronto, Ontario on March 23. The group then travels to Kansas City, Missouri for a Friends of Chamber Music concert at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on March 26. They next visit Penn State University in University Park, performing at the Pasquerilla Spiritual Center on March 29 and participating in an educational outreach program the preceding day. Their tour concludes on March 31 at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, preceded by a master class on March 30.
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