Orlando Consort, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Paul Hillier
The British composer Tarik O’Regan stands that practice on its head in Scattered Rhymes. Instead of writing a Mass using modern musical themes, Mr. O’Regan takes thematic fragments from a famous Mass as the basis of an elaborate setting of Petrarch sonnets and an anonymous 14th-century love song. Mr. O’Regan borrows his themes from the oldest existing polyphonic Mass by a single composer: Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, composed in the 1360s. Mr. O’Regan’s often dense rhythms and counterpoint make it hard to spot the source material within the work’s invitingly variegated textures. But he means you to hear it; he suggests performing Scattered Rhymes alongside the Machaut, as the Orlando Consort and (in the O’Regan only) the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir do here.
Allann Kozinn, New York Times
On this unusual new release, the Orlando Consort, a British early-music vocal group, pairs the Machaut Mass with a new work by the young British composer Tarik O’Regan (b. 1978). O’Regan’s piece, Scattered Rhymes (2006), was directly inspired by the Machaut piece, both in terms of individual melodic fragments it borrows and in its choice of texts (poems by Petrarch, a contemporary of Machaut’s). In Scattered Rhymes, O’Regan pairs each of three Petrarch sonnets with a stanza from an anonymous fourteenth-century English poem, and the texts complement each other well; when they intertwine, it creates the effect of a concerto grosso for voices. O’Regan is skillful and imaginative. His piece is clearly the work of a contemporary composer, but the homage he pays to his medieval forbear creates a wonderful, centuries-spanning resonance between the two pieces. This is a thoughtfully chosen collection of ancient and modern works, each of which seems to tell us something compelling about the others. The a cappella performances by the Orlando Consort are nearly immaculate, and the recorded sound is reverberant and sumptuous.Joshua Rosenblum, Opera News
Probing the line between very old and very new music, the Orlando Consort’s latest CD sometimes makes it difficult to tell which is which. The body of this recording is a juxtaposition of a 14th-century Mass by Guillaume de Machaut with a musical deconstruction of the same work from 2006 by the 30-year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan, who sets to music 14th-century love poems by Petrarch and an anonymous English source (writing in Latin). The O’Regan piece — in which the four-member Consort sings the Petrarch and the Estonian Chamber Choir, the English poems — sounds exquisite and delicate. The Machaut, by contrast, sounds as if its at the limits of what music is able to contain, as if the unaccompanied voices were wandering the cold landscapes of distant planets. The works also juxtapose love (O’Regan) and death (Machaut) … O’Regan again takes Machaut’s text and puts it through a musical refractor so that the single flowing line of the original fans out in a blossom of syncopated sound. The result is a kaleidoscope of color for the ear that shows the variety and modernity of so-called early music.
Anne Midgette, Washington Post