Heinz Holliger is the latest composer to be drawn into the intricacies of the works of the 14th-century French poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut, and to use it as a springboard for his own music. While the Machaut-influenced works of other composers, such as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, have generally remained rooted in their own 20th-century musical worlds, Holliger’s transcriptions, assembled between 2002 and 2009, are a dialogue between past and present in which his own music coexists with the pieces on which it is based. Three Machaut settings, two ballades and the famous Hoquetus David, are sung with great poise by the Hilliard Ensemble and interleaved with Holliger’s paraphrases for three violas, which use the procedures of the originals to create a music of fragile harmonics and buzzing dissonances. In the final three numbers, Holliger allows the two worlds to collide – first in his own arrangement of one of the lays, to which he adds extra highly wrought vocal lines, and then in two movements that leave Machaut’s originals farther and farther behind, until they are absorbed into Holliger’s own idiom.
