I have been waiting for this record since the occasion seven years ago when Andrew Parrott performed the Machaut Mass in York Minster. His performance immediately struck the ear as musically authoritative. But beyond that it has several important features that are repeated in this record. First, Machaut's polyphony was properly framed in the context of a Mass otherwise sung in plainchant: the contrast between chant and polyphony makes the polyphony all the more impressive, and it somewhat leavens the extraordinary density of Machaut's four-part writing. Second, the polyphony was sung by just four solo voices, because over the previous decade it had become increasingly clear that early church polyphony was by and large for solo voices and certainly did not include the shawms, rebecs and other minstrel instruments so often used in performances of the Machaut Mass. Third, the music was transposed down a fourth from written pitch and therefore sung by two tenors and two basses whereas all previous performers seem to have assumed (without any evidence) that Machaut's pitch was more or less the same as ours and have therefore used two countertenors and two tenors. So the record is long overdue; and, if memory serves correctly, the performance here is even more impressive musically than it was seven years ago. The complex forms of the Gloria and the Credo are handled more confidently; the broad musico-liturgical unit is well controlled and given some sense of the dramatic content of a Mass performed in this way. It is beautifully recorded as though heard from behind the High Altar of Rheims Cathedral (which may be of dubious propriety, but is musically most satisfying).
Still, there are two small problems. One is purely mechanical: the record is unbanded, so it is extremely difficult to start at the beginning of a particular polyphonic section should you wish to hear anything less than the entire Mass service. The other is textural. Even at the 'normal' pitch which performers before Parrott used for the Mass, it is a dense, thickly written work, its often bizarrely dissonant counterpoint kept in place by a strong bass line. If you put it down a fourth with two basses (however good) functioning largely within the bottom few notes of the bass clef you have two consequences: the texture becomes even thicker; and the bass line that previously held things together more or less disappears. In this respect Parrott loses quite a lot of music that seems important; by contrast the Deller (Harmonia Mundi 1C 065 99718) and Ruhland (Telefunken AS6 41125, 3/71—nla) recordings (which are the only comparative ones I have to hand) have a revealing clarity, for all their other problems.'