Heinz Holliger, Guillaume de Machaut, Geneviève Strosser, Jürg Dähler, Muriel Cantoreggi, The Hilliard Ensemble

Heinz Holliger's Machaut-Transkriptionen is a cycle for four voices and three violas, written between 2001 and 2009, that sets music by the 14th century French poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut beside Holliger's own transformations of it. Original pieces sung a cappella alternate with versions that begin as note-for-note transcriptions and move steadily further from the source. Recorded in 2010, it also captures The Hilliard Ensemble four years before the group disbanded in December 2014.

The singers are David James (countertenor), Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold (tenors) and Gordon Jones (baritone), joined by the violists Geneviève Strosser, Jürg Dähler and Muriel Cantoreggi. The sessions took place in November 2010 at Radio Studio DRS in Zürich, with Andreas Werner as Tonmeister and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. In a short liner note Holliger recalls that the first two transcriptions were written in 2001 for the West German Radio Viola-Viola Festival, "rather in contraposition to Luigi Nono's newly rediscovered early Ockeghem transcriptions."

The disc follows that plan of original and response. The Hilliards sing Machaut's Ballade IV and Ballade XXVI, and each is followed by a version for three violas, the first rendering Machaut's lines in the high, glassy sound of natural harmonics. Machaut's Hoquetus David becomes a Triple Hoquet in which the motifs are broken apart and reshaped. The monophonic Lay VII receives a new four-part vocal setting of thirteen minutes, and only in the closing Complainte from Remede de Fortune, with its Epilog, do voices and violas finally sound together.

As ECM notes, Holliger found that studying Machaut opened new vistas for his own composing. Writing in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe heard "a tenderness that reaches, composer to composer, across centuries," and noted recorded sound vivid enough to catch the violists breathing as they cue each other. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International described the final Complainte as "a kind of Machaut lava-lamp in which ancient means of expression mix slowly and randomly." Not every critic was won over: the review in BBC Music Magazine found the Hilliard performances short on bite and drive, while still praising the culminating effect of the last track.

CD, ECM New Series 2224, released on 2 October 2015, with liner notes by Holliger and Andreas Krause in German and English. The Hilliard Ensemble's own Machaut album, Motets, appeared earlier as ECM New Series 1823.