In a building with reverberation like that one, fairly quiet singing can be heard anywhere. Presumably the re-enactors are trying to represent a likely scenario rather than the most artistic performance.

Incidentally, the choice of Credo III may be an anachronism: the Graduale attributes it to the 17th century.

Dear Rood Screens,

Please come back.

All the Best,
Stimson in Rehab

The chant would most likely have been sung rather slower and with a more deliberate delivery

Perhaps. The term "elevated speech" comes to mind on hearing this presentation.

What is going on here? Are these actors? Is that a real priest or someone playing a priest?

Chonak,

I see credo 1, not credo 3, at 23:00.

What a find! I had seen snippets of this video before but not the whole thing. It was filmed at Endre, one of the hundred medieval churches on Gotland. Hire a car, take a week - it's worth seeing them all. What most struck me at Endre was the font: here is my flickr album.

The music at the parish church in Visby (the only Catholic church on the island) is outstanding. I wrote this about it in an article for Latin Liturgy after visiting in 2011:

On our second Sunday we were on the island of Gotland, where there was simply no choice: we attended the sole Sunday Mass at the island’s one Catholic church, in the walled medieval city of Visby. Both the deacon and the priest (a convert from Lutheranism) introduced us to their wives after Mass, while we shared Swedish flatbread, hallonberry jam and plums from the presbytery garden.

In Visby, there was at least as much singing as there would have been at a Missa cantata in the Extraordinary Form: the readings were not chanted, but as if in compensation, the bidding prayers and the Eucharistic Prayer were. A small choir of four sang some simple motets at the offertory and communion; a schola cantorum of two (one of them playing organ chords the while) executed the proper Gregorian Communion antiphon (from the Graduale Triplex, I noticed), interspersing it with Psalm verses sung in Swedish to the appropriate Psalm-tone. Despite their small numbers, the singers made a fine sound; but it was very much art at the service of the liturgy, and here as elsewhere the people joined lustily in the congregational chants.

Ben -
Perhaps a linguist at a Scandinavian university could be of assistance (Gotteborg?), or a Scandinavian scholar at one of our universities. I cannot comment on Scandinavia specifically, except to note the very high probability (the certainty, actually) that Scandinavian Latin was pronounced as it was everywhere else, which is to say, like one's native tongue. This practice continues in the Anglicised Latin of English universities and public schools. Erasmus famously complained that, although Latin was supposed to be the universal language, he could not understand it when going from one country to another because in Germany it sounded like German, in France like French, in England like English, and so on. Today we have a convention (hardly more than a hundred years old) of pronouncing Latin rather as though it were Italian. Historically only Italians would have done this. Italianate, Liber Usualis church Latin is a fairy tale construct.

The editors, Timothy J. McGee, A.G. Rigg, & David N. Klausner, of Singing Early Music (Indiana Univ Press, 1996) might well be of assistance. This book has chapters on early Latin in Britain, France, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, and Germany and the Low Countries. Though there is not, sadly, a chapter on Scandinavia, the editors may be able to point you in the right direction.

An afterthought: also, this Latin would have been pronounced as the Scandinavian language was pronounced in the 15th century, not as modern Scandinavian! So, one has two layers of 'authenticity' to unravel.

I should probably start by getting my wife to teach me Old Norse.

I was JUST thinking this about my wife the other day.

Andrew -
Your question is actually provocative (in the good sense!).
The last 500 years of Roman Latin, shall we say up to the dissolution of the western Roman imperium by the late 5th centuries on, were, granted, not the Latin of Caesar and Cicero and Virgil. It was, though, still Latin. The transformation of Latin into Italian was a centuries long process which was still going on in Dante's time. Italian, whether modern, mediaeval, or post Roman, is not Latin, and would have been unintelligible to the Romans of any period. To think that an Italianate pronunciation of Latin has anything other than a self-referential authenticity is to be magnificently misinformed. It would be nonsense to the original speakers of Latin of any period. It would have been unintelligible to mediaeval Italians as well, and moreso to any people of historic times outside Italy.

All this doesn't mean, though, that our Italianate Latin convention is without merit. It does make sense to have an agreed upon universal pronunciation of Latin so that it can, for the first time in over a thousand years, be the universal language it is supposed to be, particularly in liturgy. However, we shouldn't have any illusions that our convention has any real claim to being 'authentic' Latin. This is laughable. So, the debates over whether to pronounce 'o' as 'oh' or 'aw', or which of several pronunciations of 'ae' or 'oe' is the correct one, are a bit ludicrous. The only 'authentic' Latin in circulation today is the pronunciation of Kaisar's and Kikero's Latin that is taught in academia. It certainly isn't the churchman who says 'chaylee' and 'dawmeenoh' any more than it is the Englishman who says 'venightee exultimus dahminoh' and 'decaynigh' (for 'decani').

For liturgical purposes it is well that we follow our Italiante convention, but without splitting hairs and becoming vexed with one another over the 'oh' vs 'aw' problem, because this convention really is a made up construct. When giving recitals of early music, though, or in giving academic presentations or concerts, one may wish to add the authentic touch of pronouncing the Latin as de Grigny or Couperin, or Palestrina, or Tallis, or Mozart, etc., would have heard it. When presenting a reconstructed village mass in late mediaeval Sweden, one might wish to hear the Latin as it would have been spoken at that time and place by folk to whom our modern Italo-Latin would have seemed quite eccentric. For church and liturgy, though, that is another matter. Just don't lose sleep over how closely you adhere to make-believe Liber Usualis Latin pronunciation.

At the repeated rising and kneeling during the Agnus I thought I saw a small number of chairs rather than anachronistic pews. The Latin sounds very like a North-German variety, with hard G in agnus, 'sharp' unvoiced S in miserere and the 'Venetian' soft TS in pacem: plausibly Swedish to me at least, though I don't catch the vowels so closed that O sounds like U that I've had to sing in modern Swedish.

As to Credo III, I've previously doubted the Solesmes dates. Don't they in fact refer to preferred rather than earliest sources?

and 16th Century Sarum.

As they say on the internet:
PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

(translation: link, please)

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum -
so many ways of pronouncing Latin... so little time.

Having touched on the various national and cultural variations of our ecclesiastical tongue, there are yet others! To wit: the medical profession, botanists, biologists, and various other sciences. If you have ever heard your doctor speak medicalese, or your nurseryman speak botanese, you will no doubt wonder where on earth he or she learnt his Latin. It's really quite amusing sometimes. I think that in most cases these Latins are pretty close to the Anglicised Latin of English schools of learning. They never fail to sound utterly ingnorant, but such are the ways highly intelligent people were and are taught the technical language of their various professions. The next time you visit a nursery and notice an arbor vitae that has caught your eye, be careful when you ask about that are-bohr veetay: you are likely to get a puzzled look followed by 'oh, that's an arrber vytee, it's prehistoric'. Never mind that Virgil would have smirked at both of us and said (while carefully rolling his 'r') 'its ar-bor weetay if you please!' But then, somehow I don't think that we want to start singing 'ahway wehroom korpoos...' (while carefully rolling our 'r's).

(Unless, of course, that was the way we heard it when we were five years old!)

Your teacher needed more imagination!
Somehow I think that when Kaisar said Waynnee, WeeDdie, Weekkee it resonated authority.

I used to think that a French Roi couldn't possibly have been as magnificent as an English King or a German Konig. But then, the French do have a rather magnificent way of pronouncing Roi.

Don't forget the lawyers and legislators, with their writs of 'hay-bee-uhs cor-puhss' and their recess 'sigh-knee die' ('die' as in dead) or (as if they know "die" has two syllables) 'sigh-knee die-ee'.

Noel: there are all sorts of experts on chant tempo. I met one who never directed a choir of any size, but did play the flute in a swanky bar or something. HE knew how fast my schola should've sung the stuff because.......because!! And yes, he's a priest.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeoacoustics