Machaut: A Burning Heart CD review – exquisite pains and pleasures

This is the Orlando Consort’s third recording of unaccompanied songs by Guillaume de Machaut (c1300-77). The idealised pains and pleasures of courtly love are captured with haunting intensity, variously melismatic, rhythmically playful and full of conundrums and puzzles, sensed but hardly understood by a modern listener. In the mysterious Cinc, un, trese, numbers are used to spell out a name, sung with cool precision by Matthew Vennercorrect (countertenor) and Angus Smith (tenor). Donald Greig (baritone) is a steadily burning lover, devoted to his hopeless cause, in the solo Tuit me penser. Mark Dobell (tenor) opens the disc with Hé, dame de vaillance, dying of love for want of a glance from his grey-eyed lady. All sing exquisitely.