Time has smiled sweetly on Anonymous 4. Twenty-four years after their founding, three of four members of this chart-topping a cappella women’s vocal ensemble remain, sounding as good as ever ... and as simple as ever.
Their approach to music, and to recording, remains essentially unchanged: Conduct impeccable, heavily referenced scholarly research into ancient music; perform it; and then lay it down on disc — whether it be the medieval chant and polyphony of their first recording for Harmonia Mundi, An English Ladymass (1991), or the Christmas songs, carols, and ballads of medieval England, Ireland, and very British-rooted early days of the Americas on their latest recording, The Cherry Tree.
Even the recording venue, Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, remains unchanged. What is different, however, is the adaption of the DSD recording process, and the same high resolution hybrid SACD (Super Audio CD) technology that San Francisco Symphony has used for its Mahler series. The result is a warmer, clearer, and more immediate sound, equally inviting on a two-channel CD or an SACD player rigged for two-channel playback (which, praise the good Lord, I finally have on long-term loan). I lack a multichannel setup, but, given deservedly lauded producer Robina G. Young’s preference for a natural acoustic, I imagine that the multichannel presentation is even more convincing and all-enveloping. This is all for the good.
Listen to the Music
The Cherry Tree Carol
The big criticism of Anonymous 4’s singing is that it is so pure and “simple” that the mind eventually drifts away from all the loveliness. There’s a reason for their style, of course. In this instance, much of their chosen repertoire received inspiration from 13th-century Franciscan missionaries who traveled to the British Isles preaching (in ensemble member Susan Hellauer’s words) “a return to a simple, selfless form of Christianity. ... Franciscans in Britain set in motion a wave of religious poetry and song in English, the language of the common people.”
So there you have it: a program of predominantly 15th-century English carols, songs, and ballads — Hellauer explains the difference — with two 14th-century Irish “prosa” and several early American pieces thrown in. The 15th-century English Cherry Tree Carol, around which the CD is organized, is performed in a version collected in Kentucky in 1917, with appropriate accents. Everything is sung as the hypothetical “common people” might sing it, with nary a trace of the gusto that our ancestors clearly reserved for cherry picking.
Listening to this disc, will your mind drift in reverie, or in ennui? Only the Christmas angel knows for sure. Certainly, played in the background as you and the young innocents gather by the hearth on Christmas Eve to celebrate the birth of the Christian Lord, you’ll be happy that this stocking stuffer came early. As the election season approaches, we need all the purity we can get.