Gavin Bryars, Trio Mediaeval

A Worcester Ladymass reconstructs a 13th-century votive Mass to the Virgin Mary. The music survives in the archives of Worcester Cathedral, once the Benedictine abbey of St Mary in the English Midlands. The Oslo vocal group Trio Mediaeval sings it with two pieces written for the project by Gavin Bryars, a Credo and a Benedicamus Domino. For the singers, medieval music leaves room for imagination, as if they were creating contemporary music. Here old and new pieces sit side by side without a seam.

The trio is Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum. Their source is the edition of the Worcester manuscripts by musicologist Nicky Losseff, who also wrote the liner notes with Friman. The Worcester Fragments are damaged leaves of polyphony, some of them saved because they were reused to bind later volumes. From them the trio built a Mass for the Feast of the Assumption, adding Marian pieces with no fixed place in the liturgy. The album was recorded in February 2010 at the Propstei St. Gerold, with Manfred Eicher as producer and Peter Laenger as engineer.

The sequence runs to 20 tracks and about 50 minutes. The Kyrie, over seven minutes, is the longest and most elaborate of the medieval movements, with melodic lines passed from voice to voice. Short motets such as Munda Maria, Grata iuvencula and Beata viscera fill the space between the Ordinary sections. No Credo survives in the Worcester collection, so Bryars supplied one in 2008. It keeps the chant foundation and the counterpoint of the period while letting in harmonic turns the Worcester monks would not have known. His Benedicamus Domino closes the programme.

The New York Times heard three voices blended "with a supernatural clarity and beauty" that might lead even an agnostic to sense a spark of divinity in the manuscripts. In BBC Music Magazine, Barry Witherden gave the record five stars in 2012 and wrote that "the whole programme flows together beautifully". David Vernier in Classics Today and Stephen Eddins at AllMusic both praised the purity and precise intonation of the singing.

CD edition of ECM New Series 2166, first released on 18 February 2011, with a 24-page booklet including texts.