‘Huelgas Ensemble & Paul Van Nevel’

The Dream of Poliphilus is probably too complex and eclectic to be a truly canonical work of literature. But that’s a shame! This detailed story, dating from 1499, describes a dream in which Poliphilus goes in search of his beloved, imagining himself in a utopian world full of ancient architecture, literature and music. Renaissance ideas are already emerging here, but for Paul Van Nevel and the Huelgas Ensemble, they merely bridge the gap between mediaeval tastes and the Romanticism of the 19th century. As in the dream itself, the choice of music blurs space and time, whether in the anonymous, late mediaeval Je suis trestout damour raimpli, the Italian madrigal Solo e pensoso or Max Reger’s Es waren zwei Köningskinder. Love, the force that drives Poliphilus, pervades all the music.