MESSES DES DIMANCHES D’ÉTÉ—1 • Choir of Monks of the Abbey of Notre Dame de Triors • ASSOCIATION ABBÉ DE LESSEINS BMT 02 D (66:03 Text and Translation) (traditions-monastiques.com)

This disc, made a decade ago, is a classic because it was the first of a series of 13 discs embracing the Gregorian chant Mass Propers of all the Sundays of the year. The final disc completing the cycle will be issued by the time this appears. This disc includes Trinity Sunday and the four following Sundays; as it happens, the concluding disc has the preceding Sundays, the last three Sundays after Easter as well as Pentecost. Appearing generally one a year, the records display a commendable consistency of approach. The monks sing unaccompanied, following the old calendar of the Extraordinary Form of the Mass and the interpretive style of Dom Gajard at Solesmes. The abbey was founded in 1984 as a daughter house of Fontgombault, as was another abbey at Randol. All three monasteries have continued to follow the traditional rite since permission was given to do so in the 1980s; all three have recorded chant, but this series is the most ambitious project of the three monasteries.

These summer Sundays (and the contents of the next four discs to be recorded for Sundays through the end of November) were well chosen to begin the series, for these Sunday Mass Propers have always been less readily available on records, if at all, than the Masses of Advent, Lent, Eastertide, and the great feast days that fall during those seasons. While this disc adds only a Salve Regina to the Masses, the others in the series add four Mass Ordinary cycles, a couple of Credos, and other Marian antiphons. There are no notes, but each booklet prints all of the chant notation with translations of the texts.

Clearly a conscious choice must be made here to select the traditional layout of chants in the Liber Usualis over the Ordinary Form of the Mass found in the Graduale Triplex . The latter rearranges the calendar rather drastically, sometimes replaces one chant for another, and sometimes edits the melodies of those that remain. Other differences will be observed in recordings of the new rite: The introit is no longer sung with a doxology, the gradual repeats the respond, and the communion has verses. If we had an equivalent set of the new rite, there would be abundant room for comparisons, but there is none. It seemed as if the monks of Solesmes had started a new series (Classical Hall of Fame, Sundays in Ordinary Time, Fanfare 33:6), but there is no sign of a continuation. This disc and the rest of the series offer an excellent interpretation of Mass Propers according to the old calendar in the traditional Solesmes style. J. F. Weber