Transeamus is the final album by The Hilliard Ensemble, the British vocal quartet that made more than 20 records for ECM from the mid-1980s and retired at the end of 2014. It gathers English carols and motets of the 15th century, in two, three and four parts, many of them by composers whose names are lost. Several pieces had long been in the group's concert programmes without ever being recorded, among them works by John Plummer, Walter Lambe and William Cornysh.
The four voices are countertenor David James, tenors Rogers Covey-Crump and Steven Harrold, and baritone Gordon Jones. The album was recorded at the end of 2012 in the Propstei St. Gerold, the Alpine monastery in Austria that the singers describe as their favourite place to record. Peter Laenger was the engineer and Manfred Eicher the executive producer, and James wrote the short booklet note. Jones explains that these carols were sacred but probably not liturgical, sung in Latin or English, popular in their time and sometimes close to dance.
The writing is often plain, and the effect comes from tuning and blend rather than display. The programme opens with two pieces for St Thomas of Canterbury, then passes through Christmas carols such as Lullay, I saw and the two-part There is no rose. Plummer's Anna mater, a four-part motet addressed to the mother of the Virgin, gives James a long, floating top line, while Lambe's Stella caeli is denser and keeps changing colour. The disc ends with Ah, gentle Jesu by Sheryngham, a composer known only by name. It is a dialogue between Christ on the cross and a penitent sinner, and James recalls that in concert it left "both listener and performer" in "stunned silence".
Reviewers heard the album as a farewell and found the group's sound intact. In BBC Music Magazine, which gave it five stars, Kate Bolton wrote that "the accounts are intimate and subtly coloured, the Hilliards' distinctive sound still unsullied, four decades on." Frank-John Hadley of DownBeat called the music "enchanting rather than narcotizing", renewed by "the quartet's interpretative finesse". John Quinn, in MusicWeb International, singled out Ah, gentle Jesu as the finest piece on the disc.
This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM New Series 2408, first released in October 2014, with sung texts and translations in the booklet.
