--> original review
This is the fourth and (sadly) final volume in the Tacet label’s Mare Balticum series, which celebrates obscure early music from the Baltic region. As on the previous three volumes, which featured music from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and northern Germany, Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett leads the Ensemble Peregrina in a survey of forgotten and previously lost works found in various archives around the German-Polish region once known as Pomerania. Some of them have been preserved only incompletely, requiring Budzińska-Bennett to fill in a few musical blanks herself; many have never been recorded before or even heard in centuries. All of the music consists of single sung melodic lines, but this isn’t “plainchant” in the usual sense — it’s discursive, sometimes simple and sometimes elaborate, and occasionally almost ecstatic, in a style that those familiar with the music of Hildegard von Bingen will likely recognize. Like the previous volumes in this series, this one should be considered an essential purchase for any library that collects pre-baroque music.
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This is the fourth and (sadly) final volume in the Tacet label’s Mare Balticum series, which celebrates obscure early music from the Baltic region. As on the previous three volumes, which featured music from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and northern Germany, Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett leads the Ensemble Peregrina in a survey of forgotten and previously lost works found in various archives around the German-Polish region once known as Pomerania. Some of them have been preserved only incompletely, requiring Budzińska-Bennett to fill in a few musical blanks herself; many have never been recorded before or even heard in centuries. All of the music consists of single sung melodic lines, but this isn’t “plainchant” in the usual sense — it’s discursive, sometimes simple and sometimes elaborate, and occasionally almost ecstatic, in a style that those familiar with the music of Hildegard von Bingen will likely recognize. Like the previous volumes in this series, this one should be considered an essential purchase for any library that collects pre-baroque music.
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