The challenges and rewards of performing early music are here vividly illustrated by The Binchois Consort, as creative scholarship comes to the aid of two substantial—but fragmentary—works by Jacob Obrecht, and an audacious recorded sound attempts to recreate the experience of the original performers 500 years ago: an album set to attract huge interest from critics and Renaissance scholars alike.

The life of an itinerant foot soldier in the Middle Ages is briefly, vividly, rendered in the short popular song 'Scaramella': Scaramella is going off to war with lance and buckler / la zombero boro borombetta, la zombero boro borombo / Scaramella is out on a spree with boot and shoe / la zombero boro borombetta, la zombero boro borombo. The song, widespread during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries both in its native Italy and further afield, summarizes the exploits of a hapless, rather comical figure (clearly, a precursor of Baldrick!), whether setting off to war with his lance and shield, or dressed up for a night on the town. The nonsense words (imitating fifteenth-century cannon fire?) add to the comic effect and, on the face of it, the song makes an incongruous choice as the basis of a major sacred work. But incorporating a pre-existing secular tune into a substantial mass setting was a common practice among the composers of the time, and Obrecht's 'Missa Scaramella' is one in a long line of so-called cantus firmus masses.

The life of a soldier from a very similar time, place and background is also the focus of our album cover. The anonymous Třeboň Altarpiece, on which the Scaramellian soldier is depicted, dates from the late fourteenth century. He’s taken from the third panel of the altar, which portrays the Resurrection; the figure of the risen Christ an effective contrast with the shocked and weary guards, unwillingly roused from sleep, who witness the event. The unknown artist brilliantly captures the soldier's expression at the exact moment of the momentous experience, an astonishing, never-to-be-forgotten interruption to a life of fighting and drinking.

And our particular thanks go to Fabrice Fitch and Andrew Kirkman; not only for their wonderful and idiomatic realization of the entire Scaramella project, but also for suggesting the panel from the Třeboň Altarpiece as a potential cover design for it.