Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Secret of Success
Comment: An English Ladymass. 13th and 14th Century Chant and Polyphony in Honor of the Virgin Mary. Performed by Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham, Martha Genensky, Susan Hellauer and Johanna Rose).
Recorded in October, 1991, at Skywalker Sound, Nicasio, California.
Harmonia Mundi HMU 907080. Total time: 59’01”.
Musically, this is one of those rare, very special discs that not only sells well and then disappears into oblivion but that sells well and then stays relevant for many, many years. While re-listening to it, I asked myself again and again what the secret of its success was. A number of answers suggested themselves, none of them completely satisfactory, but all together providing something of a key. First, of course, there are the pure, vibrato-less soprano voices, combining in what some reviewers have, quite correctly I feel, termed “angelic” harmony. The booklet, unfortunately, does not give much information about the performers, but I seemed to hear here one very high soprano voice, what in English Renaissance music would be called a “mean”, plus two “normal” sopranos and an alto. The excitement of the high “mean” soprano and the narrow harmonies of the other voices can truly send shivers of delight down your spine. This is an effect that one usually only hears on discs of choral music (for example, on some of Harry Christophers’s recordings of the masses of John Taverner for Hyperion), and it is guaranteed to uplift the soul and impress with the beauty of the human voice. But added to this here are the medieval melodies, which, although often very strange to our ears, seem to reflect our common past and appear, in a certain way, to be familiar, perhaps as an echo of the joint human memory of those centuries of sacred music – or perhaps just as an individual memory of liturgical song heard in childhood. And of course, the music itself has an intensely “spiritual” flavour, with the excellent recording technique, the absolute stillness of the background and the ensemble’s decision to do without any instrumental accompaniment amounting to an invitation to meditation and devotion.
Perhaps it is indicative, however, of our post-modern age that none of my fellow Amazon reviewers appears to have reflected on the texts which Anonymous 4 have here put together (the result of painstaking musicological research, I should add). Despite all my enthusiasm for the sound and the music of this disc, I have to add that as an evangelical Christian (and as a child of the Enlightenment) I find the unabashed, sensuous Mariolatry of these medieval texts to be profoundly disturbing and, from a Protestant standpoint, utterly heretical. You don’t have to be a Catholic to enjoy the wonderful singing on this disc, but if you study the texts (which are printed in full with translations), you may, like me, become very grateful for what Martin Luther, John Calvin and their followers did for the Church.
As a footnote I should, perhaps, add that if you have enjoyed Anonymous 4's music-making, you might also like to try that of the Italian female ensemble La Reverdie, whose discs for the French label Arcana, although very different, also have some of the qualities that made Anonymous 4 so successful.
