With ‘Guillaume de Machaut: A lover’s death’, The Orlando Consort concludes its twelveyear survey of the secular music of France’s great fourteenth-century composer-poet, a survey which has greatly enhanced our understanding and appreciation of an extraordinary figure. The themes of this final instalment are familiar—the fleeting joys and lasting sorrows of courtly love, and the narrator’s near obsession with his lover, the desire for whom ‘Love in my heart has set ablaze / And stoked’ (to quote the vigorous opening motet).