Founded in Oslo in 1997, the Norwegian female vocal ensemble known as Trio Mediaeval released its first CD on the ECM label, “Words of the Angel,” in 2001, making Billboard’s top 10 best-sellers list. Now the group — call them Anonymous 4 Minus One — is back with an absorbing disc of neo-medieval music for unaccompanied voices, most of it by living composers.
With one exception, the 13 works on this album last no longer than six minutes; each is an ethereal, haunting sonic tapestry designed to evoke, as the annotator writes, “a timeless present.” The English composers Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody and Andrew Smith, and the Ukrainian Oleh Harkavyy, have taken medieval liturgical texts and created medieval-sounding music for them, much as Arvo Part has been doing for decades. Hearing an actual medieval composer, Lionel Power, alongside Bryars and Smith, points up how subtly and effectively the moderns have achieved their musical pastiches.
Trio Mediaeval’s singers produce a seamless, shimmering sound and craft their vocal lines pristinely and expressively, with impeccable intonation. The producer has chosen a suitably reverberant church in which to record them. If you enjoyed hearing the Norwegian threesome in their local debut the other week at Rockefeller Chapel, don’t miss this album.
