CHANTICLEER's MACHAUT Album to Arrive on Delos/Outhere Music

Vocal ensemble CHANTICLEER is set to release Machaut on the Delos/Outhere Music label, an album pairing Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame with a selection of the composer's secular chansons centered on courtly love. The release follows the group's recent holiday album, Joy to the World, its first for the Delos label. Music Director Tim Keeler leads the ensemble on the new recording, with a staged production titled Machaut Project to follow in San Francisco.

Chanticleer (photo: Amanda MacBlane)

'Breathtaking in its accuracy of intonation, purity of blend, of color and swagger of style' (The Boston Globe), multiple Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer follows up the huge success of their recent holiday album, Joy to the World – the group's first release on the Delos label – with the new Machaut (Sep 11). Led by Music Director Tim Keeler, the album repertoire includes Guillaume de Machaut's seminal Messe de Nostre Dame, along with secular chansons broadly dealing with courtly love and its accompanying themes of desire, infatuation, despair, and hope. The first single from the album, 'Douce dame jolie,' is available now. The second single, 'Gloria,' will be released August 21.

Keeler comments:

'These works feel very modern, very personable, very intimate and relatable. They are also reminders that people in the 1300s had a lot of similar emotions, desires, and fears – so if we can relay those same things, even though we're singing in old French, I hope the audience will come along for the ride and be a part of that journey. We are taking inspiration from the performances that came before us and putting them together in what I think is a really interesting combination of standard early-music no-vibrato singing and freedom for expression through ornamentation and improvisation. It's a thrill for us to be able to communicate to audiences what somebody was thinking – and hear the same things somebody was hearing – 700 years ago.'

President & General Director Philip Wilder adds:

'Studying, performing, and recording these liturgical settings has been part of Chanticleer's DNA since our founding, and we are thrilled to release this recording as we revisit Machaut's monument of medieval innovation.'

The album includes chansons such as Douce dame jolie and Riches d'amour alongside the Messe de Nostre Dame, a setting believed to be among the earliest complete musical treatments of the Mass Ordinary by a single composer. Machaut, who served for decades as canon of Reims Cathedral while producing secular works for a series of noble patrons, is noted in the release for the survival of nearly his entire body of work.

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