The music of this album is a clear example of the deep-rooted migrational nature of our local existence. It is music of a remote past, marked by radically different life conditions. It is music from distant areas connected by wandering people in search of better life conditions. It is music handed down by word of mouth for a long time and finally documented in written form during the last century. It is music to be recovered, reconstructed and re-contextualized in an ongoing process of searching, appropriating and re-inventing, of sense making at the intersection of a resonating past and today's breathing.

The pure voices of Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth, and Torunn Østrem Ossum combine to make Trio Mediaeval a sensation among early music fans. Yet Soir, dit-elle is largely an album of contemporary works written especially for this group by such active composers as Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody, Andrew Smith, and Oleh Harkavyy. With the exception of the late medieval Missa Alma redemptoris mater by Leonel Power and the twelfth century chant on which it is based, the works are modern imitations in the medieval ecclesiastical style.

The exquisitely decorated 15th century choir book known as the Old Hall manuscript was lost to history for the best part of 400 years until its reappearance in a Catholic seminary at the end of the 19th century. The largest surviving collection of medieval motets and mass movements, it immediately became the most celebrated source of English music of the period. It was written in the first instance by a single scribe to ensure that the music of his fellow singers was not forgotten. Many of them are known only from this manuscript, and on this album they find their voices again after more than half a millennium of silence, transformed by the singing of Trio Mediæval in the company of Catalina Vicens, alongside new music by David Lang and Marianne Reidarsdatter Eriksen.

Would that it were possible to give a debut recording a higher rating. The Trio Mediaeval is a remarkable group of women from Scandanavia whose repertoire consists of contemporary works and medieval compositions, as well as Baroque church music. This recording comprises a Messe de Tournai of polyphonic mass movements from a 14th century text and is interspersed with motets and songs from roughly the same period, including a number of works from English manuscripts.