Chanticleer releases Machaut on Delos/Outhere Music, pairing Messe de Nostre Dame with composer’s secular chansons (Sep 11); performs staged Machaut Project live in San Francisco (Sep 13–20)
(August 2026) — “Breathtaking in its accuracy of intonation, purity of blend, of color and swagger of style” (The Boston Globe), multiple Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer follows up the huge success of their recent holiday album, Joy to the World – the group’s first release on the Delos label – with the new Machaut (Sep 11). Led by Music Director Tim Keeler, the album repertoire includes Guillaume de Machaut’s seminal Messe de Nostre Dame, along with secular chansons broadly dealing with courtly love and its accompanying themes of desire, infatuation, despair, and hope. The first single from the album, “Douce dame jolie,” is available now, and the album can be streamed here. The second single, “Gloria,” will be released August 21.
See a video clip of Chanticleer performing “Douce dame jolie”
Keeler comments:
“These works feel very modern, very personable, very intimate and relatable. They are also reminders that people in the 1300s had a lot of similar emotions, desires, and fears – so if we can relay those same things, even though we’re singing in old French, I hope the audience will come along for the ride and be a part of that journey. We are taking inspiration from the performances that came before us and putting them together in what I think is a really interesting combination of standard early-music no-vibrato singing and freedom for expression through ornamentation and improvisation. It’s a thrill for us to be able to communicate to audiences what somebody was thinking – and hear the same things somebody was hearing – 700 years ago.”
President & General Director Philip Wilder adds:
“Studying, performing, and recording these liturgical settings has been part of Chanticleer’s DNA since our founding, and we are thrilled to release this recording as we revisit Machaut’s monument of medieval innovation.”
Machaut on Delos/Outhere Music and staged Machaut Project (Sep 13–20)
Chanticleer’s Machaut presents music from two facets of the life of Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) that to modern sensibilities might seem incompatible. The Messe de Nostre Dame reflects the fact that he spent the last four decades or so of his long life as canon of Reims Cathedral, but as a 14th-century poet-composer sponsored by a series of noble patrons – including King John of Bohemia, Charles V, Duke of Normandy (“the Wise”) and Charles II of Navarre (“the Bad”) – he also produced a considerable amount of secular work in the courtly love tradition, like the chansons “Douce dame jolie” and “Riches d’amour,” among others recorded on the album. Machaut is also a unique representative of his time because his genius for self-promotion and attention to his own posterity ensured the survival of almost his entire oeuvre.
The Messe de Nostre Dame is a seminal work that is believed to be the first setting of the Ordinary of the Mass by a single composer. Prior to that time, composers wrote settings of every Mass movement, but they were not meant to be performed together and lacked any overarching structure. The movements were grouped together in manuscripts only by function (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.). The Messe de Nostre Dame was intended for liturgical use, so in practice the movements would have been scattered throughout the liturgy, but for the first time they show melodic, harmonic, and structural similarities, and Machaut grouped them together in his collected works. The Messe de Nostre Dame could therefore be considered the first large-scale work in the Western music canon.
Reviewing a previous concert performance of Machaut’s chansons, The New Yorker declared: “In Chanticleer’s dulcet rendition, voices brushed against one another like roses swaying in a breeze. Across some six and a half centuries, a composer held an audience spellbound.” Following the release of Machaut, Chanticleer unveils its first fully staged production since its landmark Curlew River, first produced in the mid-1990s. Directed by acclaimed opera visionary Elkhanah Pulitzer, a frequent collaborator with John Adams who staged his Antony & Cleopatra at the Metropolitan Opera last season, the world premiere of The Machaut Project offers an immersive, visually striking journey into Machaut’s medieval world. The staging – in six performances at San Francisco’s ODC Theater – uses ritualized gesture to explore both the beauty and vulnerability of the courtly love tradition (Sep 13–20).
Success of Joy to the World
Chanticleer’s most recent album, Joy to the World, was released last fall and marked the group’s Delos label debut. Praising the album’s “elegantly meditative program,” a glowing review in The New York Times found that the “sophisticated new arrangements make even the most well-worn Christmas carols feel subtly altered and freshly luminous,” and that “unifying it all is Chanticleer’s hallmark powdery blend and intonation so pure that close dissonances produce faint, shimmering beats.” As the review concluded: “The result is a beautifully understated album with just enough strangeness to cut through the holiday glut.” Likewise, NDR Kultur selected Joy to the World as Album of the Week, praising its “flawless intonation” and calling it a “benchmark recording.” The reviewer for Gramophone agreed, naming Joy to the World his top choice for Christmas albums this season and commenting: “Throughout I was struck how the individual voices, each so full of personality, yield such a homogeneous vocal meld when required.” Nor was the group any less lauded in live performances. The Bay Area Reporter declared:
“The whole tenor of the concert was summed up by an audience member I overheard say, ‘It isn’t Christmas until I’ve heard Chanticleer.’ Their voices exhibit dynamic control and distilled perfection, switching from 12-part sublime blissful harmony to unison singing with exact precision and expressive phrasing, not to mention perfect pitch. There is constant rotation of the singers, but the current lineup going into its third year is one of the ensemble’s very best in its entire history.”
Fall tour 2026
Chanticleer’s primary touring program for the coming season is Paradise, which explores humanity’s eternal longing for the ideal: visions of a perfect world, love, or future. Spanning centuries, cultures, and styles, the program includes songs of praise by Renaissance composers Tomás Luis de Victoria and Giovanni Valentini; biblical interpretations of paradise in Darius Milhaud’s “Psalm 121” and Maurice Duruflé’s “Ubi Caritas”; visions of earthly love in Jean Sibelius’s epic Finnish love song, “Rakastava”; and a collection of contemporary songs including arrangements of Jacob Collier’s “Little Blue,” Richard Evans’s “Journey to Recife,” and Manuel Sánchez Acosta’s “Paraíso Soñado,” reminders that sometimes paradise is as close as a plane, a train, or a dream. Chanticleer also continues their celebration of America’s 250th year of independence by showcasing the diverse voices, songs, harmonies, and rhythms of the nation with the Our American Journey program. The cornerstone of the program is a commission by composer Trevor Weston, demonstrating the link between traditional American hymnody and African American Spirituals. Other repertoire traces the progression of the American choral tradition from Black Gospel quartets to Shape-Note singing to Barbershop quartets and vocal jazz.
About Chanticleer
The Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling more than one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the globe.
Rooted in the Renaissance, Chanticleer’s repertoire has been expanded to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz and popular music and to reflect a deep commitment to the commissioning of new compositions and arrangements. The ensemble has dedicated much of its vast recording catalogue to these commissions, garnering Grammy Awards for its recordings of Sir John Tavener’s Lamentations & Praises and the ambitious collection of commissioned works entitled Colors of Love. Chanticleer is the recipient of Chorus America’s Dale Warland Singers Commission Award and the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. During his tenure with Chanticleer, Music Director Emeritus Joseph H. Jennings received the Chorus America Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African American choral tradition.
Named for the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chanticleer continues to maintain ambitious programming in its hometown of San Francisco, including a large education and outreach program, and an annual concert series that includes its legendary holiday tradition, “A Chanticleer Christmas.”
Chanticleer: Machaut
Label: Delos / Outhere Music
“Douce dame jolie” single release date: July 31
“Gloria” single release date: Aug 21
Release date: Sep 11
Messe de Nostre Dame
1 Kyrie I
2 Christe
3 Kyrie II & III
4 Gloria
5 Credo
6 Sanctus & Benedictus
7 Agnus Dei
8 Ite missa est
9 Douce dame jolie
10 Certes, mon oueil
11 De Bon Espoir / Puis que la douce rousee /
Speravi
12 Rose, liz, printemps, verdure
13 Dame, de qui toute ma joie vient
14 Riches d’amour
CHANTICLEER
Tim Keeler, music director & countertenor
Tavian Cox, Logan Shields, Gerrod Pagenkopf, Luke Elmer, Cortez Mitchell, Adam Brett Ward, Bradley Sharpe, countertenors
Vineel Garisa Mahal, Matthew Mazzola, Andrew Van Allsburg, tenors
Andy Berry, Jared Graveley, Matthew Knickman, baritone and bass
Chanticleer: Machaut live in San Francisco
Sep 13m, 13, 17, 19m, 19, 20, 2026
San Francisco, CA
ODC Theater
The Machaut Project: Devotion & Desire
Elkhanah Pulitzer, director