A beautiful and fascinating collection. Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is famous as lover, heretic and poet. His treatise on ethics, his Story of a calamity (the calamity of his love for his pupil Heloise, their marriage and enforced separation and his castration by her infuriated relatives) are classics of medieval Latin literature. So are his hymns, over 100 of them, many written for the community of nuns of which Heloise became Abbess. He wrote music as well as words for a great number of them, but until a short time ago it was thought that only two of these melodies had survived. Recent scholarship has now added several more. In this collection six hymns and sequences by him (plus a seventh, setting his words to a plainchant melody) are placed in the context of music that he and Heloise very probably knew. With rich irony these include three antiphons associated with (one actually composed by) Abelard's fiercest opponent, the hammer of the heretics, St Bernard of Clairvaux.
What makes the attributions so convincing is that these flexible, expressive melodies show an elegance and technical adroitness that are very similar to the qualities that have been long admired in Abelard's poetry. His De profundis, for example (a setting not of Psalm 130 but of his own meditation upon it, a poem of characteristic metrical ingenuity), is a most remarkable example of long-term 'modulation', austere and mournful drooping phrases in one mode giving way in stages to serenity and a quite different modality at the end. It also seems right and thoroughly Abelardian that the stages by which lament is turned into hope should be so clearly marked: when the text speaks of acceptance of guilt, at the realization (a new and beautifully expressive melody) that repentance is not enough and at the final, confident plea for mercy.
Reading too much of Abelard's life-story into this music is an agreeable pitfall into which Dr Berry herself lures us by inviting us to hear in Dolorum solatium David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, something of the ''utter despair in which he found himself after his parting from Heloise''. The exquisite and moving close, a single voice crying ''My hands are wounded by playing the harp, my voice is harsh from lamenting, my breath fails'' does indeed sound like a message. So in a way, but much more consoling, does the gracious, almost blithe Easter sequence Epithalamica, in which Heloise's Sisters would have welcomed the Resurrection, in language drawn from the Song of Songs, as a bride and her companions welcoming the Bridegroom. It is touching to think of them singing this, perhaps 'dramatizing' it a little by setting the soloist apart. Sponsus and Samson dux fortissime are dramas of a more public kind, each of the characters in the former (wise and foolish virgins, Gabriel and 'Ecclesia') having their own melodies, that of the foolish virgins being distinctly folk-like, with further dramatic effect drawn from the use of two languages (Latin and Occitan—the ''langue d'oc'') and brief spoken lines that seem to call for staged action. And in Samson dux fortissime the robust choral declamation, the long and powerful narrative for Samson (warrior prototype of Christ) and the sudden use of a high tenor for Delilah have a pungent theatricality.
After hearing the whole collection you have to remind yourself that throughout you have heard nothing but monody, a single line discreetly shared between solo voice and a 'chorus' of at most three. Subtlety of word-setting, flexible variation of melody, supple rhythm—all these need responsive but not assertive singing. Once or twice one or other singer sounds a touch stressed by the chosen pitch; otherwise the performances are pretty well ideal, and the acoustic of Winchester Cathedral frames them beautifully.'