Sweet Harmony
Beautiful music with a quintessentially English accent...

In the middle of the 15th Century poet Martin le Franc famously described how Dufay had adopted the English manner championed by John Dunstaple – la contenance Angloise – and how, to Continental ears, this new style of music sounded so fresh, and above all, joyful.  In about 1475 the musicologist Tinctoris claimed that during his own lifetime music had been transformed into a “new art”.  He singled out the English as responsible for this giant leap forward, and Dunstaple in particular.  But the composer formerly known as Dunstable was not only musical godfather to the Renaissance, he was also the first truly great English composer with a legacy that has spanned more than half a millennium.  Dunstaple’s rich harmony with its cross-relations has remained a quintessentially English characteristic right up until today: this sequence of English music is built around his settings of all five movements of the Ordinary of the Mass (recorded by TONUS PEREGRINUS for Naxos for release in October 2005), interspersed with motets and anthems by John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Thomas Tomkins and the ensemble’s director, Antony Pitts, whose music was recently described by The Gramophone as having “the potential to be a real runaway success....His is a compositional voice of real personality and imagination”.

“The True Story...”
of Guillaume de Machaut & Péronne d’Armentières

TONUS PEREGRINUS plus Dr John Crook as Guillaume de Machaut

The number one classical artists and winners of a Cannes Classical Award, TONUS PEREGRINUS bring to life perhaps the most authentic mediaeval love story of all, charting the passionate affair between the 14th Century’s most celebrated poet and composer, Guillaume de Machaut, and a young fan known as Péronelle d’Armentières.  Their poetry, their letters, and Machaut’s extraordinary music come together in a unique multi-media experience...

Almost seven hundred years ago a boy grew up in the Diocese of Rheims infused with the mediaeval Liturgy of the Church.  That boy was to become a composer ahead of his time, adorning both Rheims Cathedral and the courts of kings and nobility with sounds that are still new today.  Guillaume de Machaut’s music has a similar effect to the huge rose windows in his home cathedral: it stuns with intense harmonic colour and intrigues with melodic detail and rhythmic chicanery.  Machaut was also one of the finest poets of the 14th Century – which meant that his musical experimentation was seeded in an experience of poetic form and wordplay refined in the most privileged cultural environments of court and cathedral.  Machaut’s words and music come together in what is perhaps his finest work (and the ultimate 14th-century multimedia presentation): Le Voir Dit. 

Le Voir Dit begins with a picture of a messenger handing the lover a letter addressed “a guillem” [to Guillaume], and the unforgettable line: “Here begins The Book of the True Poem”.  The True Story recounts in great detail Machaut’s celebrated (and only partly-requited love) for a young admirer named Péronne – some 9000 lines of poetry, as well as their letters, the love-poems and songs that they sent to each other, and of course, his own wonderful music: four ballades, four rondeaux, and a monumental lai: the ‘lay of hope’.  

Miserere
Music touching on our deepest hopes and fears...

TONUS PEREGRINUS offers a programme resounding with seasonal penitence and laments, framed by two pillars of the choral classics - Barber’s own transcription of his famously spellbinding Adagio, and Allegri’s stunning masterpiece Miserere (probably higher than you’ve ever heard it before).  Allegri’s original setting was composed in the first half of the 17th Century, and was gradually established as the annual musical high point of Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel.  The famous ornamental abbellimenti are likely to have been refined each year by the papal singers themselves: but whether or not they were written down and the copies of the music kept under lock and key, the Miserere acquired an extraordinary mystique that brought crowds to the Sistine Chapel up until the late 19th Century, giving visitors such as Mendelssohn and apparently the young Mozart the chance to write at least some of it down.  The version that has become famous is a patchwork from various contradictory, misintepreted or just plain incorrect sources; however, it seems to touch most listeners in a way that is entirely in keeping with the text which tells of King David's remorse after his affair with the beautiful Bathsheba.  The new version of Miserere sung by the young voices of TONUS PEREGRINUS restores authenticity in three aspects: sung entirely by solo voices, the four-voice chant is sung at a high pitch throughout, and the famous high-arching phrase is at what must be its correct transposition...  The programme also features well-known and rarely-heard settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

A Valentine's Day extravaganza of human and divine love, including music by Michael Zev Gordon, Grayston Ives, Sebastian Forbes and Henry Purcell

Christmas music including Tallis's Missa Puer natus est for seven voices

The very first complete polyphonic settings of the mass and the passion narrative to have come down to us. The Mass of Tournai is a collection of lively and harmonically-striking mass movements by various anonymous composers from the first half of the 14th Century, a generation before Machaut's seminal Mass; the Luke Passion setting comes from the so-called Windsor Manuscript (a.k.a. Egerton 3307).