Overview
“Le vray remède d’amour: ballades, rondeaux, virelais, motets et textes dits (A true remedy for love: ballads, rondeaux, virelais, motets and spoken texts)” is a collection that mainly contains secular music compositions composed by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), a composer and poet of the Ars nova style of 14th-century France, and is known for his sacred music such as “Messe de Nostre Dame (Mass of Our Lady)” (around the early 1360s) and many secular songs (chanson) about courtly love.
Commentary
The album was performed by Ensemble Gilles Binchois, a French vocal ensemble known for their performance of the Ars nova music, and conducted by Dominique Vellard.
The album was recorded on 4-7 October 1988 in l’Eglise Saint-Martin de La Motte Ternant, Côte d’Or, France. The CD was released by Harmonic Records in France in 1989. It was reissued by Spanish label Cantus Records in 2000. It was also included in “Guillaume de Machaut: Sacred and Secular Music” (a set of 3 CDs) released in 2011 by Dutch label Brilliant Classics.
It contains secular songs in a variety of types, such as virelai, ballad and rondeau, motets, and poetry readings.
The secular songs are monophonic/polyphonic vocal music compositions accompanied by harp, percussion, gittern (string instrument), fiddle, flute, and bagpipes. They had inherited the style of Trouvère (Northern French poet-composers of around the 12th century, who had been influenced by troubadours).
The music is characterized by its distinctive, soft and subtle voices (solo/chorus, male/female), and a sense of vast expanse of space-time, which is specific to the Middle Ages.
