Ensemble Gilles Binchois - L'Amor de Lonh: Medieval Songs of Love and Loss (2010)

Focusing on the central notion – one very dear to the troubadours themselves – of “love from afar”, this new programme leads the listener through that maze of amorous emotions linked with the sense of absence (be it as a result of the crusades, owing to war, to tournaments, or to paternal bans...); the route chosen here is an unconventional one, traversing differing styles and epochs, with music from villages as well as from the courts, an immersion in the vast world of song and in the company of its earliest masters - the troubadours, the trouvères - and of its ageless servants: the traditional singer-poets from Occitania and from Spain...
After four CDs on Glossa dedicated to music of a roundly religious nature, in L’Amor de Lonh Dominique Vellard and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois come forward with their first secular programme in a long time, offering excitingly- committed interpretations and demonstrating once more why – after more than 30 years of activity – they are still considered the leading exponents of whatever repertories they lay their musical hands on.