Chants des voûtes cisterciennes – Les Anges et la Lumière / Chants from the Cistercian Vaults – Angels and Light. Ensemble Venance Fortunat, Anne-Marie Deschamps. Adda / L’Empreinte Digitale ED 13006 (1990) barcode 3366750130068
Reissue l’empreinte digitale ED 13073 (1997?) barcode 742495307324:
Recorded 1990, Abbaye de Sylvanès, France
Some of it is mesmerizingly beautiful
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 28 January 2013
Some are lucky, some are not – and good marketing helps. Hildegard von Bingen, the Missouri Benedictines of Mary Queen of Apostles, the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos or the Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz made a splash in the charts recently or a few years ago and, sure, no complaint about that. On the other hand, when it came out in France in 1990, this disc by Ensemble Venance Fortunat didn’t attract much attention. Bad marketing.
It claims to be devoted to the musical environment and legacy of Saint Bernard, the founder in the 12th century of the Abbey of Clairvaux and the man who developped the order of the Cistercians (founded in 1098, before Bernard joined it, it was the even-more-ascetic offshoot from the ascetic Benedictine order) that generated the building of hundreds of monasteries all over Europe and a specific style of religious architecture. In fact, reading the very detailed liner notes, not every piece from the program seems to be directly or even indirectly related to Saint Bernard and the Cistercians (and the notes acknowledge that the Cistercians were not as creative musically as they were architecturally). The program includes excerpts from the 9th Century Laon Manuscript which is one of the earliest sources for Gregorian Chant and musical notation (tracks 8, 11, 15) but predates by a couple of centuries the birth of Saint Bernard. Even the two 11th century Alleluias in the form of 2-part organums, from a manuscript from the Chartres Cathedral, must also be earlier than Bernard’s birth (1090), let alone his joining of the Cistercian order in 1113. 
From complementary information gathered on the Internet (Richard H. Hoppin, La musique au Moyen âge, presumably a French translation of Medieval Music (The Norton Introduction to Music History), ISBN 9780393090901, thanks for letting me peek Google Books
), they would be among the earliest examples of organum using contrary movement and containing intervals of thirds and seconds then considered dissonant (“In its earliest stages, organum involved two musical voices: a Gregorian chant melody, and the same melody transposed by a consonant interval, usually a perfect fifth or fourth”, thanks again Wikipedia). If I understand the liner notes, one of the songs, track 10, is even a reconstruction by the Ensemble’s leader, Anne Deschamps, in the style of “sequellae” from Aquitaine, an improvisation by two or multiple singers on the last syllable of the Alleluia. And there’s even a Hildegard song, track 13, “De Angelis”.
Speaking of which: the liner notes claim a relation through the fact that all those pieces are somehow related to the angels, which was one of the main preoccupations of Bernard’s theological writings. Well, OK, why not. But the closest link the recital seems to have with the abbot is to have been recorded in the Cistercian abbey of Sylvanès, supposedly remarkable for “the clarity of the octave and fifth harmonics echoed by the stone and, a rarer phenomenon, of the third and seventh”. I’ll trust their word for that, at first the voices as recorded seemed a bit distant, but cranking up the volume took care of that.
Not that all this really matters, what matters is the beauty of the music and of Venance Fortunat’s rendition of it. I don’t know much about Medieval music practice and can’t tell how “authentic” Deschamps’ readings are, and I doubt that they are. Some songs are sung by only men (tracks 2, 8, 11, 12, 16, 17), some only by women (6, 7, 13, 15), and some by mixed ensemble (tracks 1, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 18), and while there were communities and convents of Cistercian nuns, I doubt very much that the ascetic Bernard allowed that kind of mixing in his order. But then, in her introductory note, Deschamps says that those musicians’ “amazing musical creations demanded to be revived and `invented'”. The Ensemble’s lineup is two sopranos, one mezzo, one tenor, one baritone and two basses. Most of the men’s songs sound like Gregorian Plainchant (with only track 12 more lively and varied, and track 17 magnificently ecstatic), and so does track 15 sung by women, but women singing plainchant make it sound less austere and uneventful – you didn’t hear me say “boring”, did you? – than men, in fact they make it sound quite beautiful. The opening song, an Alleluia from the 13th-Century English Worcester manuscript, is playful and gamboling, and most others are contemplative and ecstatic in nature. And, finally, among these, some (7, 10, 14, 17 already mentioned, 18) are so beautiful, with melismata coiled like illuminated initials in a Medieval codex, that it would make you cry. If only for those, this CD should have made the charts, years before the Hildegard craze. TT 68 minutes.