Organists Review - February 2000
The Clerks' Group extend their repertoire in these performances of motets by Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377) together with items from the Ivrea Codex - which preserves 14th-century French vocal music. Pervious recordings by this small choir, one voice to a part AA (one male/one female/TT/Bar, have been made for ASV. One of a series of three devoted to Ockeghem (1410-1497) won the 1997 Gramophone magazine Early Music Award.

The Group now marks its recent association with SIGNUM RECORDS - a very enterprising young company - by presenting a further series of three CDs, this time of music from the 14th century, the first of which is under review. Nine motets by Machaut are interleaved three at a time with seven disparate items from the Ivrea Codex. Texts are given in full, carefully translated; and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has provided succinct and intelligible notes.

Knowledge of Machaut's treatment of texts is essential to follow: for example the simultaneous presentation of Christe qui lux et dies together with Veni creator spiritus in one of the Latin motets. Three of the nine motets are in Latin, the others in French. The Latin motets are in four voice parts, the others in three. The six solo voices of the Group are never all to be heard together on this recording. The most accessible motet at a first hearing is to be found in track 6 start with this and you will be entranced by its hauntingly expressive character.

Ivrea is a small town south of the modern ski-resort Aosta. The codex contains Ars Nova motets, liturgical Mass settings, and secular songs, presented anonymously for the most part. To let the recording play through results in some rather striking contrasts. A Sanctus is followed by a very irreligious item, where it is just as well that what 'the woman' would have of her 'Robin' is immediately followed by sterner matter.

The singing generally has a welcome freshness and vigour, with voices free of intrusive vibrato and of irritating mannerisms. Edward Wickham as Director perhaps overburdens himself as Baritone as well, and falls a little below pitch on occasion; but he certa9inly moves things on and instils some buoyancy. There is a certain lack of freedom in the hocketing; and I found the employment of a male and of a female alto disturbing; mo matter how well sung, the female upper voice can give the unwanted effect of a soloist accompanied by the other voices.

If, as the Psalmist had it millennia ago, ' a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday', this recording may be regarded as a n attempt to reconstruct what was available to the Almighty from about 3.30 in the morning of the second millennium AD. Many significant and controversial decisions and compromises have to be made to get this early music off the page - musica ficta, rhythm, voice-production, tempo, pitch, pronunciation, and so on. The Almighty would surely recognise the value of this enterprise. Note the reduced price, and order with confidence.

Gramophone Magazine - October 1999
The Clerks' Group is pared down here to its simplest line-up, with a single voice to a part. This makes sense in fourteenth-century repertories, and it gives The Clerks a freshness and directness that has been at times lacking in recent recordings. A new departure is the repertory explored, obviously earlier than anything the group has previously attempted, and no longer merely composer-based. Machaut gets top billing, but much of the programme is anonymous and derives from a single source, the Ivrea Codex (copied in the latter years of the century). This consists of settings of individual Mass movements, for the most part chordally conceived, declamatory and decidedly extrovert. In that sense it contrasts nicely with the introversion of Machaut's three-voice songs, and shows off The Clerks at their best. The singers also indulge themselves with a memorable rendition of one of this repertory's most famous pieces, Clap, clap! Sus Robin. It may no longer need saying, but I'll say it anyway; don't be put off by the anonymous tag.

One gets a clear enough impression from this recording of the lines of stylistic demarcation that Machaut draws in his work: the three-voice songs are audibly 'experimental' in their chromatic turns, while the four-voice Latin motets prize rhetorical effects of texture and large-scale design (although the manner in which successive voices are introduced in Tu qui gregem/Plange, regni and Felix virgo/Inviolata is equally strange, the latter's soft tones contrasting sharply with Gothic Voices' interpretation on Hyperion, 1/84). Those familiar with previous recordings of the songs (for example the two versions of Dame, je suis cilz/Fins cuers doulz, again with Gothic Voices, as above) will hear differences in the editions used (here, by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson); they may also hear that The Clerks' declamation of French is not as clear as that in Latin-texted pieces (whether Machaut's or the works from Ivrea), resulting in less strongly imaged performances of the most wilfully characterful music here. As an all-Machaut recital this would face formidable competition, but the Ivrea music leavens the programmes and fills a gap in the catalogue very elegantly.
Fabrice Fitch