Trobairitz is a wonderful and incredibly frustrating album of new music fused with Medieval poetry featuring Toronto soprano Shannon Mercer and Montreal period-instrument/world-minded band La Nef.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Released by Montreal label Analekta, the album’s title refers to female troubadours who flourished in aristocratic households in southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. They wrote of love, lust and personal adventures with remarkable freedom, and just enough of their poems have survived to show us that the emotional rollercoaster of a teenager’s inner life hasn’t changed much over the past 800 years.
There is little to tell us how these poems were sung, so La Nef music director — and multi-instrumentalist — Seán Dagher and his bandmates have created richly textured, rhythmically lively, melodically seductive new settings for 12 old texts. The sound is Celtic-fiddley spiced up with light percussion, much like something one would hear on a Loreena McKennitt album.
Mercer brings her luminous voice and full emotional engagement to bear on each song, making this album a real treat.
The frustration comes from not knowing what she is singing.
Medieval southern French — known as the Langue d’Oc — has as much in common with its Italian and Spanish and Basque and Catalán neighbours as it does with the language spoken in northern France. It looks and reads as familiarly as Middle English does to a 21st century Torontonian — which means not well at all.
The booklet that comes with the CD does not include any of the texts, and even Mercer’s fine diction can’t make these foreign old words meaningful. Online, one can download the texts — but without translations, which is not any more helpful.
In other words, this is one of those albums that needs to be enjoyed as music. Fortunately, it’s good enough to work in this single dimension. Too bad the producers couldn’t have made a bit more of an effort to finish their job properly.
You can find all the album details here.
Update: Analekta has sent word that they are hard at work on translations of the song texts in to both modern French and English. The company spokesperson added that, ” It is very complex to translate and because of the complexity of this work, we could’nt publish the final document in the same time as the album.”
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
