**** MACHAUT: Messe de Notre Dame. Ensemble...

**** MACHAUT: Messe de Notre Dame. Ensemble Organum. (Harmonia Mundi)

This recording is a fake--a glorious, four-star fake! The best early music performance styles often tell us a lot more about the interpreters’ times than history. Mahler’s Bach orchestrations are Mahler; those angular, rhythmically jerky performances of Guillaume de Machaut’s great 14th century mass that made it a sensation in the ‘50s also made it sound something like the music Stravinsky was writing at the time.

Now Marcel Peres, the inspired leader of the vocal group Ensemble Organum, has looked to microtones and how specific qualities of voice interact with pitch, something the Middle Ages may have known about, but surely not with the sophistication found here.

Peres causes the music to leap forth with the unbelievable freshness of the latest pitch experiments from La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Even the Kronos Quartet, which has taken to arranging Machaut lately, can’t achieve such a startling sense of modernity. As a bonus, Harmonia Mundi adds a free Ensemble Organum sampler CD of its chant recordings, and what a wonderful, hard-hitting antidote it makes to those woozy monks with their hot-tub sonorities.