Anonymous 4 – David Lang: Love Fail (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Anonymous 4 – David Lang: Love Fail (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 49:45 minutes | 753 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Cantaloupe Music

David Lang’s “love fail” is a meditation on the timelessness of love that weaves together details from medieval retellings of the story of Tristan and Isolde with stories from more modern sources. The recording also spotlights the vocal quartet Anonymous 4, whose commitment to medieval music and historical scholarship has been acclaimed worldwide.
Composer: David Lang
Orchestra/Ensemble: Anonymous 4

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Anonymous 4 – The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bing (2005) MCH SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

Anonymous 4 – The Origin of Fire: Music and Visions of Hildegard von Bing (2005)
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DST64 2.0 & 5.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 65:07 minutes | Scans NOT included | 3,1 GB
or FLAC 2.0 Stereo (converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans NOT included | 1,04 GB

Returning to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century German abbess and mystic, Anonymous 4 explores the theme of the Pentecostal power of the “Fiery Spirit”. Hildegard’s intensely emotional chants and visions (including the monumental hymn O ignee spiritus and some of her finest antiphons) are presented here framed by hymns and sequences that she and her convent sisters would have heard and sung every day.

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Anonymous 4 – Wolcum Yule (2005) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Anonymous 4 – Wolcum Yule (2005)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:06:29 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

It is difficult to imagine a better celebration of the immense spiritual and historical richness of Yuletide than this multi-faceted and deeply rewarding disc. Accompanied by Andrew Lawrence-King, who plays the Irish harp, Baroque harp, and psaltery with exquisite grace and refined expressiveness, the crystalline voices of the Anonymous 4 weave an extraordinary sonic tapestry and blend to always maintain the right balance and phrasing, their fey voices conjuring up the timeless beauty of a magical holiday. Featuring Celtic and British songs and carols, some traditional, some by contemporary English composers, this disc underlines the archaic and even timeless nature of Yuletide, the ancient Celtic holiday of lights, which later blended with Christmas. While the music dates from the Christian era, the performance captures a spirit of timelessness that reminds listeners that, in essence, light, as a life-giving and spiritual force, truly unites Celtic spirituality and Christianity. This cosmic luminosity appears, for example, in the subtle shadings of the traditional English song “The Holly and the Ivy,” in which the Anonymous 4 reach truly divine heights. Interestingly, the disc includes two first recordings: “A Calendar of Kings” by Peter Maxwell Davies and “A God, and Yet a Man,” by Geoffrey Burgon. However, of the contemporary compositions, the most profound is John Tavener’s soulful, enigmatic song “The Lamb,” inspired by William Blake’s mystical poem from his Songs of Innocence.

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Anonymous 4 – Secret Voices: Chant & Polyphony from the Las Huelgas Codex, c.1300 (2011) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Anonymous 4 – Secret Voices: Chant & Polyphony from the Las Huelgas Codex, c.1300 (2011)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 58:24 minutes | 1,05 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Anonymous 4 revisit their favourite era in repertoire that illuminates medieval women’s affinity for the most complex polyphony of their time. Spanning the entire 13th century — from virtuosic motets and conductus to heartfelt laments and sacred songs—the remarkable Las Huelgas manuscript was compiled for a convent of aristocratic Castilian women who (in spite of a rule forbidding Cistercian nuns from singing polyphony) sang the most beautiful, advanced and demanding music from all across Gothic-era Europe.

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Anonymous 4 – Marie et Marion (2014) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Anonymous 4 – Marie et Marion (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 55:59 minutes | 1,01 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © harmonia mundi

Many listeners have gotten their introduction to medieval music through the American vocal quartet Anonymous 4, which has a knack for performances that are insightful, sensuous, and apt at putting the concerns of the music into a contemporary settings. They remain productive after several personnel changes and two decades of recordings, several of which have performed strongly on classical sales charts. Marie et Marion is something of a sequel to the group’s 1994 release Love’s Illusion, which contained music on the theme of courtly love from a manuscript collection known as the Montpellier Codex. It was collected, around 1300, in Paris, not Montpellier, and it was, as far as it is possible to know at this late date, state-of-the-art stuff at the time. Marie et Marion focuses on a specific aspect of this repertory: the connections between sacred and secular polyphony at a time very close to the dawn of the latter. The two titular figures are the Virgin Mary and a shepherdess named Marion, the same one who appears in the earliest known work with a named composer, Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion, or Play of Robin and Marion. In that piece she rejects the amorous advances of the shepherd Robin, and here too she is, like Mary, rather unattainable. The point is that medieval musicians did not think of the sacred and secular spheres as firmly separated the way modern ones do. They could even, as a couple of pieces in the final “Marie-Marion” section of the program, be put together in the same piece, with sacred and secular texts going on at the same time (the use of multiple texts is characteristic of this music), and the foundational “tenors” of all the polyphonic pieces come from the realm of chant. This is a profitable listen either for the delicious sounds of the singers’ voices clashing in the linear harmonies of the music, or for an introduction to the polytextual motet and chanson around 1300, or both.

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