CDPilgrimage to Montserrat / The Renaissance Players, directed by Winsome Evans.
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Product details
The Renaissance Players, directed by Winsome Evans, was founded
48 years ago in Sydney. It has a nucleus of nine to ten musicians
(singers and instrumentalists), which is varied according to the
needs of particular performances. In addition, the group contains
a poetry reader, and one or two miming clowns. The Renaissance
Players has established itself as the most accomplished and
widely known early music group in Australia. Their sense of
musical style, colourful costuming, technical ability and vital
presentation are their landmark qualities.
The main focus of Pilgrimage to Montserrat is on the ten pilgrim
songs, the so-called cants del romeus, contained in the Llibre
Vermell (the Red Book), a codex from the library of the Monastery
of the Blessed Virgin at Montserrat in Catalonia. The codex today
contains only 137 sheets of what is believed to have once been
172 sheets. Amongst the missing contents there may have been an
even more numerous collection of pilgrim songs than the ten which
have survived.
The Renaissance Players' reconstruction of, and additions to,
this much-recorded collection of medieval pilgrim songs - many of
which are dance songs - will demonstrate several new ways of
performing and organising this material, rather than simply
emulate the approaches undertaken by other, modern early music
ensembles.
The aim is to show how richly varied, yet stylistically viable,
reconstructions of "lost" performance traditions can be
Liner notes include programme notes and texts.
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