Le Chansonnier de Bayeux

Program: #23-40   Air Date: Oct 02, 2023

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from the recording Le Chansonnier de Bayeux featuring the ensemble Alla francesca directed by Brigitte Lesne. It is on the Paraty label and is CD 221290. For more information: https://cmm-paris.fr/en/production-artistique/ensembles-et-artistes/alla-francesca. 

The pieces belong to all kinds of genres: love songs (sometimes courtly, more often bawdy), drinking songs, satires, women’s songs, others dealing with events and characters from the Hundred Years’ War (Le Roy engloys and Hellas Ollivier Vasselin). Only pious songs are not featured: even the incipit Belle tres doulce mere Dieu surreptitiously leads to rather lewd verse. A poetical and musical contrast can be at the very heart of some songs (J’ai veu la beaulté m’amye). Some of the themes have floated through the centuries; thus the dialogue of a father and his rebellious daughter in La belle se siet, already set to music at the time of Guillaume Dufaÿ, will turn into our children’s song Ne pleure pas Jeannette,sung to an altogether different melody. The upper classes of the late XVth century would appreciate the many sexual innuendoes and the ‘popular’ situations referring to unhappily married women cuckolding their husbands, drunks, soldiers complaining that they have not been paid, and even a menagerie of noisy animals (a donkey in My my). No doubt the audience hugely enjoyed these stagings of country life, real or fictitious, as they did in the XIIIth century when listening to some motets and pastoral songs of trouvères.

This early Renaissance manuscript – collected for the young Charles de Bourbon – is composed entirely of songs in Old French, all monodic (in one voice) at a time when polyphony reigned supreme. It is the moving testimony of a passage between two worlds, scholarly music and popular refrains, tavern and court art. Many of the songs it contains are already old “hits”, coming from the poetic art of the trouvères. In this program, the two artists deploy a rich and diverse instrumentarium, reflecting the different ways in which we can approach music that can be located at the origins of a certain “French song”…

Duo Brigitte Lesne & Pierre Boragno:

Vocals, recorders, gothic harp, bagpipes, one-handed flutes and drums, percussion, double flute, chifonie (hurdy-gurdy), courtaud, bombarde & bells

Brigitte Lesne, singer, specialized in medieval music in all its facets, sacred and secular, between the 9th and 16th century. She directs the female vocal ensemble Discantus and the instrumental and vocal ensemble Alla Francesca. He has been heard on all continents and on more than thirty recordings, many of which are references. She teaches at the Center for Medieval Music in Paris and at Sorbonne-Université and is regularly invited to direct or design programs for choirs, masters, conservatories, etc.

Pierre Boragno, recorder flautist, is passionate about all wind instruments in early music, alternating research, publishing, and concerts. He performs with the best baroque, Renaissance and medieval music ensembles, with whom he gives concerts all over the world and participates in numerous recordings. Founder of the trio Alta (bombarde, chalemie, trumpet), he regularly collaborates with Alla Francesca and Discantus. He teaches at the Regional Conservatory of Versailles.

CD Info

CD 221290