Harmonia Mundi released a CD “Scattered Rhymes” with contemporary and early music, it contains Tarik O’Regan’s “Scattered Rhymes” and “Virelai: Douce dame jolie”, Guillaume de Machaut’s “Messe de Nostre Dame” and “Douce dame jolie”, Guillaume Dufay’s “Ave Regina celorum” and Gavin Bryars’s “Super flumina”.
The performers are Orlando Consort and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Paul Hillier.
The author of the main composition of the recording, Tarik O’Regan (1978), is born in
His “Scattered Rhymes” (‘Rime sparse’, as Petrarch describes his work in the first poem of the Canzionere sequence) represents an interlacing of two fourteenth-century texts which each toy with the ambiguities of intertwining sensuous and divine love. One stemming from England and one from the influences of Papal Avignon, these texts and this composition are designed to be framed by Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame” (circa 1364), both contemporaneously and geographically. The movements can be performed separately, intertwined with movements from the Machaut mass, or performed continuously as a fifteen-minute work.
The recording is made in May 2007 in