There is a moment near the middle of this disc — Lambert Colson’s cornetto threading through Loyset Compère’s “Le Grant desir” with a tone so warm and slightly reedy it genuinely sounds like a human throat catching its breath — when the whole peculiar project of early music interpretation comes into sudden, sharp focus. This is what we are after. Not reconstruction. Presence.
The ensemble Qualia is three people. Three. Anna Danilevskaia on fiddle, Christophe Deslignes at the organetto, Colson moving between recorders and cornetti. The economy of means is deliberate, and it pays off in a kind of chamber intimacy that larger consorts — however distinguished — rarely achieve. You hear every decision.
The program draws substantially from the Segovia Cathedral Codex, one of the stranger surviving manuscripts of the late fifteenth century, its contents a kind of musical crossroads where Flemish polyphony met the political realities of the Hapsburg-Aragon dynastic marriages of the 1490s. Philip the Handsome arrives in Castile; Flemish composers follow the court; a scribe in Segovia writes things down. History is sometimes that simple, and that consequential.
Alexander Agricola dominates. Five pieces, and he earns every one of them. His “Cecus non judicat de coloribus” — the blind man judges not of colors, a wry title for music so visually intricate in its part-writing — is the kind of counterpoint that makes you sit forward. Agricola’s melodic lines coil and double back, ornament themselves almost compulsively, and yet somehow breathe. Danilevskaia’s fiddle catches this quality exactly; her intonation is period-flexible without ever sounding approximate. There is a difference, and she knows it.
Johannes Tinctoris presents a different problem. He was the great theorist of the age — his Terminorum musicae diffinitorium is the first printed dictionary of musical terms — and one reads his compositions wondering how much the analyst in him occasionally throttled the composer. His setting of Robert Morton’s “Le souvenir” is handsome enough, and the Ockeghem arrangement sourced from the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence gives Deslignes a chance to prove what a small portable organ can do in the right hands: the organetto fills in harmonics with a slightly buzzy persistence that is oddly moving. But “Tout a par moy” does feel a little stiff — correctness without quite enough abandon.
Then there is the question of sacred versus secular, which the program handles without apology. Fray Benito’s Kyrie and Gloria sit alongside “De tous bien playne” — Hayne van Ghizeghem’s irresistibly neo-erotic chanson, recycled by half the composers of the age — without either piece suffering from the proximity. That promiscuity of context is historically accurate. Courts didn’t organize their music libraries by liturgical category.
The basse-danse on La Spagna — that ubiquitous cantus firmus that every late fifteenth-century composer apparently felt obligated to address at some point — arrives near the end and gives the ensemble its most overtly physical moment. You can feel the floor underfoot.
My one reservation is temperamental rather than technical: the disc occasionally feels more illustrative than argumentative. The performers are sensitive to style, sensitive to each other, beautifully matched in ensemble — but there are passages where I wanted someone to take a risk, lean into a phrase, make an interpretive claim that might provoke an argument. Agricola, above all, invites that kind of boldness. Qualia approaches him with too much reverence.
Still. This music deserves to be heard, and this performance deserves to be heard. In a crowded field of early music recordings that sometimes seem to exist mainly to prove period-instrument craft, Mundus et Musica makes a genuine case for repertoire that most listeners — even reasonably devoted ones — will not know. Fabrice Fitch’s booklet notes are detailed and honest about the philological puzzles involved. The recorded sound is close and present without being suffocating. Recommended, warmly and without notable qualification.
