Allegorie - L'Arbre de Mai: Chansons & dances au temps de Guillaume Dufay (2004)

L'arbre de mai (The Tree of May) is a terrifically presented album of early Renaissance music, one that tries to place the listener inside the musical culture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and does a highly imaginative -- sometimes overactively imaginative -- job of it. The album divides its 19 works into four thematic groups: Love and Youth, the Tree of May, War and the King, and the Evening of Life. Within each group, works by high-Netherlandish composers like Dufay and Compère are mixed with anonymous works of a more popular quality, and vocal works alternate with instrumental dances. The effect of the thematic presentation is to make the listener focus more closely on the texts than one would when encountering one of these pieces in a vacuum. And what texts they are! Compère's Le grand désir (The Great Desire) is one of the sexiest pieces of music around, concluding with a reference to some unspecified means of female contraception ("I am she who retains nothing of her lover, when he comes; I will show you how. Ahoy!"). The selection of works is easy to imagine as a concert that might have been heard in Burgundian times, and the album broadens the context even further by including a thematically relevant artwork from the period, a page from Tacuinum sanitatis (Table of Health) showing three boys picking cherries from a cherry tree, one of them giving another a boost into the higher branches. A commentary on this image makes clear, without spelling them out, a host of stylistic issues that help the listener understand the music of the Dufay generation, its medieval roots, and the powerful lure the Italian Renaissance was beginning to exert.
The vocal pieces are played with instruments doubling the vocal parts, with a variety of instrumental settings that follow the Renaissance distinction between haut (loud, outdoor) and bas (low, quiet, indoor) forces. The performers, a French group called Allégorie, assert that their decisions are "based on factual information" but that they "went on to imagine several possible interpretations." These interpretations lead them into some very fancy percussion work that distracts from the overall effect; the point of the album would have been equally well made without the rather strange cross rhythms introduced into Dufay's Resvelons nous, resvelons, amoureux; alons ent bien tos au may. To counterbalance this complaint, one can point out that Allégorie generally captures a wonderful down-to-earth quality in this music, sometimes lost in more ethereal European readings. In all, this is a disc that breaks new ground in making the music of the Renaissance come alive for modern hearers. -- James Manheim