Roger Helou Organetto Virtuoso

Back when I was in college, in the middle ages of speculative medieval music performance practice, being a piano major who had taken some lessons in organ, I'd considered taking up the playing of those tiny little organs you see in medieval pictures, the ones that look like a little pipe organ with 2' register pipes.  The motive was, mostly, that I loved the music of Francesco Landini and the other Italian composers of the 14th century ( Jacopo da Bologna was also a great composer).  Landini was famous for his playing of the instrument as well as for his numerous settings of vocal texts.  There is a famous manuscript of keyboard settings of many of those composers who are depicted, the Squarcialupi Codex, maybe the most beautiful of the medieval music manuscripts, certainly one of the most valuable in musical terms.  Here's Landini as pictured in it:

But the recordings and few live performances of people playing reconstructed organettos were pretty boring and uninspiring.  Truth be told, everything about the actual performance of medieval music was pretty much speculative, everything from what the ideal vocal or instrumental tone was to what the improvisation we knew was a part of the actual practice.  Then the goal was always "realizing the composer's intent" which isn't a bad goal when the composer has actually left hints of what that was, though apart from a few ambiguous or widely interpretable descriptions, such as those of Guillaume de Machaut, we didn't really have more than speculations and personal preferences to go on.  We always talked as if that were one "thing" instead of the wide range that it certainly must have been at least as variable as modern musical practice.   And that was a recipe for constant warfare among those who had come up with competing methods of reconstruction which went in and out of fashion unnoticed by the wider world.   It wasn't exactly something I'd have enjoyed being thrown into, so I opted for concentrating on music by living or recently dead composers and, then, teaching. 

Anyway, for the past few days I've been enjoying the organetto performances of one Roger Helou which I have to say, knowing musicians and how they will always be trying to use whatever sounds they can make with their instruments, I think must give us a better feeling of what it must have been like to hear Landini than the "informed" performance practice of fifty years ago.   He certainly must have taken advantage of the variable pressure and articulations available through his manipulation of the bellows, instead of the uniformity that so many seemed to strive for in their "reconstructed" performances. 

Francesco Landini - Fortuna Ria 

Anonym: Lavandose Le Mane / Francesco Landini: Che cosa è questa amor

De Tout Flors (by Machaut, I believe)

Is it how the composers of these pieces would have performed it or enjoyed hearing it?  I don't know, but given how people who, unlike any of us, heard it described the playing of medieval instrumental music, I'll bet this is closer than what people were doing fifty years ago.