O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes on disc
18th April 2008
Scattered Rhymes, which was written to accompany Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame of c.1364, sets love poetry by Petrarch and an anonymous English contemporary. The texts are intertwined as the music slowly evolves from fragments of Machaut’s mass and the interplay between the solo group and chorus becomes increasingly elaborate.
Following the premiere of the work at Spitalfields Festival in 2006, Geoff Brown wrote in the Times that “O’Regan’s gift for lyric flight seems boundless. You might have to reach back to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music, or even Tallis, to find another British vocal work so exultant”.
In the coming weeks, the piece will receive country premieres in the Netherlands at St Laurens Church in Rotterdam on April 26 and Ireland at the Galway Early Music Festival on May 17.
Scattered Rhymes
Orlando Consort, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir,
Paul Hillier conductor
Harmonia Mundi HMU807469
