At last. Ever since the dawn of the CD era many of us having been waiting for reissues of records by Musica Reservata; and in fact when the Editor asked us in our Christmas lists for 1987 to suggest earlier records for reissue I unhesitatingly chose Musica Reservata—many others of my generation would have done the same. Those records and concerts were a major shot in the arm. At a time when medieval and renaissance music tended to be either jolly or limp, Michael Morrow presented this sharp-edged and unromanticized vision. Tone colours were harsh and bright; tempos were unwavering; and, particularly at the hands of that extraordinarily versatile singer Jantina Noorman, we felt transported (mainlined, we probably said at the time) to another age and culture.
Since then, the impact of Michael Morrow's vision seems to have waned: the records were long gone (and hardly ever turned up second-hand, for obvious reasons); Musica Reservata more or less evaporated, for various reasons too complex to explore just now; and there is a danger that the pretty and the romantic are again taking over. So I am particularly pleased that a new generation has a chance to experience that shot in the arm.
But in celebrating this first reissue of Musica Reservata, it is worth just noting that many of those most distinguished performers of medieval and Renaissance music in Britain today had their first professional experience under Michael Morrow—among them Andrew Parrott, Christopher Page, Philip Pickett, Christopher Wilson, Anthony Rooley, Emma Kirkby and Margaret Philpot as well as (I think, at least in this early material) Christopher Hogwood and David Munrow. (To come entirely clean, me too, though my 'career' eventually took a rather different turn.) One of these later said that he anticipated meeting Morrow for the first time with as much awe as if he were meeting Paul McCartney.
Morrow's approach was highly controversial. This record received a thoroughly dusty review in Gramophone. And in some ways it is not on the level of his ''Decameron'' record or the French dance collection: almost every track here shows Musica Reservata at its most extreme, and some of the performances are by no means as polished as they could have been. But that was part of the excitement: a striving for ideals that were not quite possible. It got us all actively confronting exactly what we were doing with this music, and why. With luck, it should do the same again.
Sadly, Philips have treated their treasure with less than respect. Michael Morrow's name is pretty well sidelined (though he is credited with having 'revised' the music, a remark that could be actionable). Jack Sage's important sleeve-note is replaced by something new and soggy. The texts of the songs are no longer there. And the music sounds thinner and less vibrant than on my heavily-played 25-year-old LP. Still, John Beckett, who conducted the record, gets his credit and his keyboard playing comes across with the same invigorating clarity. There are also vintage performances by Grayston Burgess, Nigel Rogers and Edgar Fleet, all sounding quite different from our normal perception of those wonderful singers. And of course there is the inimitable Jantina Noorman.
Well: you may hate it, like my distinguished predecessor in these columns; you may even find it thoroughly redolent of the 1960s (oh, it is); but the thrill is definitely still there.'