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GRAMOPHONE (07/2025)
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Ricercar   Référence: RIC473

Code barres / Barcode : 5400439004733

Reviewer : David Fallo 

Binchois has always had bad luck in the recording industry. While the entire works of Ciconia have been recorded twice (with a third complete set on the way) and more or less the same is the case with Ockeghem, Binchois only rarely experiences a disc devoted to his music. In fact, the only substantial case known to me is the issue devoted to his songs done by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois almost 40 years ago. Great slews of his church music seem never to have been recorded at all, among them some of his longest and most ambitious works.

So the new release by Le Miroir de Musique under Baptiste Romain is very much to be welcomed, all the more so because it follows a slightly eccentric line that is unlikely to be cultivated by other such ensembles. Three of the songs are presented only in keyboard arrangements, beautifully played on a luscious-sounding chamber organ by Grace Newcombe. One of those – Je loe Amours, his most often copied work and also his longest song, but not known to me in any recording (though there are two very pleasing American performances on YouTube) – is also performed by a fiddle and a viol, entirely omitting the contratenor line, which is certainly authentic. The church music is entrusted to a group of four women and three men, twice prefaced by a single note on Indian bells and once accompanied by a sackbut. One of his motets is performed by a ‘loud’ ensemble of bagpipe, shawm and trombone. A further eccentricity is that none of the solo singers is identified in the booklet.

As mentioned, this does not stand in the way of other groups wishing to add to the discography of the most wrongly undervalued composer of the 15th century. Everything comes with translations in modern French, English and German.

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