E-Mail This Article to a Friend " Evening, " they said Trio Mediaeval’s Boston debut, plus Pieter Wispelwey

When the vocal group Trio Mediaeval released their first recording, there was some confusion as to just what the CD was called. Its official title was Words of the Angel, but the cover featured a photo overlaid with the words "Soir, dit-elle" ("Evening, she says"). Many took that to be part of the album’s title. But their new CD, puzzlingly enough, is in fact called Soir, dit-elle. So just what was that first record called, anyway?

"Yes, that’s a question I’m sure we’re going to be asked fairly often," laughs Linn Andrea Fuglseth, the Trio’s middle voice, over the phone from her home in Oslo. "We really wonder if that’s what ECM wanted to call [the new] recording." It turns out that the words were never part of the title of the first album, but part of the image — a still from a Godard video — that ECM chose for the cover. "It actually has nothing to do with the music on the recording, either, but I think it sets a really beautiful atmosphere. I mean, it’s a bit mystical, it’s sort of a contemplative thing."

Contemplative and atmospheric are adjectives that attach themselves easily to pre-Baroque music. But the three sopranos who make up this trio — Fuglseth, Anna Maria Friman, and Torunn Østrem Ossum — don’t confine themselves exclusively to medieval music. They also perform contemporary works, most written especially for the group. Soir, dit-elle weaves pieces by Gavin Bryars, Ivan Moody, Oleh Harkavyy, and Andrew Smith around movements of the Missa Alma redemptoris mater by the 15th-century English composer Leonel Power. The result is a network of starkly beautiful sound, all the more intriguing since Power’s florid style and odd dissonances often sound more "modern" than the austere musical language that some of the contemporary works use. But all of it sounds compelling when brought to life by these three distinctively colored voices.

This intermixing of old and new wasn’t part of the trio’s plan when they formed in 1997. "I must say first that we didn’t have a plan to do contemporary music at all," Fuglseth admits. But they encountered a piece by Moody, a young English composer, at a summer school run by the Hilliard Ensemble, probably the most distinguished small vocal group around. "The Hilliards always have a composer-in-residence. We were quite against it in the beginning — we thought that being there only a week — we wanted to use all the time we could to do the music we really liked!" But they greatly enjoyed Moody’s piece, and the composer, for his part, asked whether he could write something for them. That piece, "Words of the Angel," would become the (real) title track of their first recording.

Those summer sessions with the Hilliard Ensemble were a formative part of the trio’s early development, and Fuglseth credits them with mentoring the young group. "We didn’t know how people would react to it, or if we were good enough. But all the encouragement and the comments we got from them really made us believe that we had something that was really quite special. We have a lot to thank them for." They formed a lasting bond with John Potter, a tenor who has since left the Ensemble, who coached them and produced their first recording.

Because they are an all-female vocal ensemble, comparisons with Anonymous 4, medieval music’s other girl group, are perhaps inevitable. Fuglseth says she doesn’t mind the connection at all. "We didn’t know of them until some years after we began performing — we started to listen to them and thought that they’re a really great group. They’re a different group, though, because they’re academics, and I think they’re very interested in finding out the right way to do things. That’s not really a thought that we’re very occupied with — we sing the way it sounds good to us, and think that that’s right."

Trio Mediaeval perform at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury Street, in a concert presented by the Boston Early Music Festival on Saturday, February 7, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $52; call (617) 424-7232.

MORE OLD AND NEW. Reviewing a concert by the Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross noted that he "is somehow having a major international career despite the fact that he is not named Yo-Yo." Wispelwey is equally at home in repertoire (and on instruments) both ancient and modern. Next week he’s in town for his Boston Symphony Orchestra debut, where he’ll play C.P.E. Bach’s Cello Concerto in A major in four concerts under guest conductor Ton Koopman February 5 through 7 and 10, with an open rehearsal February 4. In between he’ll find time to give a cello master class under the auspices of the Cambridge Society for Early Music at Harvard’s Paine Hall. That’s Monday, February 9, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10, or $5 for students; call (617) 489-2062. For BSO tickets call (888) 266-1200.