Gavin Bryars, Andrew Smith, Ivan Moody, Trio Mediaeval

Soir, dit-elle is the second album by Trio Mediaeval, the three Scandinavian women singers whose debut Words of the Angel had made a strong impression on ECM New Series in 2001. Here the balance between old and new is reversed. The four movements of a fifteenth-century Mass by the English composer Leonel Power are spread across the programme. Between them stand new pieces written for the trio by four living composers.

The singers are Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum. The album was recorded in April 2003 at the Propstei St. Gerold, the Alpine monastery in Austria that ECM favours for vocal music. John Potter, formerly of the Hilliard Ensemble, was the recording producer and wrote the liner notes. Peter Laenger engineered it and Manfred Eicher was executive producer. The contemporary works are by Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody, Andrew Smith and Oleh Harkavyy. All were composed for these three voices between 1999 and 2003.

Power's Missa Alma redemptoris mater is built on the Marian chant of the same name, and the disc ends with that plainchant, so the listener hears the source only after the Mass. Harkavyy's Kyrie opens the album and leads straight into Power's Gloria. Bryars contributes four laude on anonymous Italian Marian poems, three of them with a solo part for one member of the trio. Moody's The Troparion of Kassiani and A Lion's Sleep set Byzantine texts, the second a lament of Mary by Simeon Metaphrastes in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's translation. At nearly ten minutes it is the longest piece on the disc.

American and British critics praised how well the centuries fit together. In Gramophone, Barry Witherden noted that pieces by four quite different composers "have come together with scarcely a join showing", and he called Bryars "a revelation". Greg Sandow wrote in The Wall Street Journal of "white voices, dark silence all around them", and found the group "arresting, vivid, calm but never peaceful". Andrew Quint in The Absolute Sound singled out the two Moody pieces as especially fine.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1869, first released in January 2004. The booklet reproduces a page from the fifteenth-century Trento codex 87.