early music review

Lautten Compagney Berlin
69:00
deutsche harmonia mundi 19802802402

If you accept the thesis of this CD, that ‘the wonderful sound of the lute and small Baroque ensemble perfectly fits these short pieces from Renaissance and Baroque to the music of the Beatles or Massive Attack’, then you will be perfectly happy with this unorthodox programme. However, while I am a little impatient with the growing fashion of playing pop music on early instruments – I find it hard to believe that anybody buying a CD of music for lute consort is yearning to hear its rendition of Massive Attack’s Psyche, Percy Mayfield’s Hit the road Jack or John Lennon’s Norwegian Wood – lautten compagney BERLIN go a stage further by allowing their tastes in contemporary pop to spill into some of their interpretations of the early material. Thus, my usual approach of just programming out the silly pop numbers and listening to the ‘proper’ repertoire is thwarted, as many of the tracks are influenced to an extent by the pop approach. Annoyingly, when they are playing ‘straight’, the ensemble produces lovely, convincing performances of their chosen material, but blundering into a Dowland track with an appalling skiffle accompaniment throughout made me wary of all the apparently early music on this CD. So as you will gather this CD is definitely not for me, but I do struggle to conceive who it is for – it is always fun for musicians to mess about on period instruments with wildly inappropriate music, but unless potential purchasers of a lautten compagney Berlin CD innocuously entitled ‘The Lute Songbook’ scoured the back for more detail they would be in for a disappointment. Where was ‘the grown-up in the room’ during the planning and execution of this CD?

D. James Ross

Lettres en musique
Anne Marie Dragosits
74:00
L’Encelade ECL2402

From its first explosive entry on this CD in music by Claude Balbastre, the clavecin by Christian Kroll of 1770 from the Collection François Badout, Fondation du Sautereau, Neuchâtel establishes itself as an instrument demanding our attention. At full volume, it has a huge voice, but is also capable of much more subtle and gentle utterances. Anne Marie Dragosits certainly puts it through its paces and timbres in music by a selection of largely unfamiliar French composers of the 18th century. The inspirations of the CD are the characters in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 troubling novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to whose letters Dragosits attaches the music. Although this idea is an intriguing one, a linking device of this sort is not really needed from my perspective as a framework for music that more than stands on its own two feet. However, fans of the novel or the ensuing films will undoubtedly enjoy the music as a soundtrack to the various ongoing intrigues of the plot. What is striking musically is the unerringly high standard of the music, regardless of the obscurity of its composer, and Anne Marie Dragosits and her Kroll clavecin are its ideal advocates.

D. James Ross

Robert Costin
79:47
firsthandrecords FHR 173

These accounts of five of CPE Bach’s Wq 70 Sonatas with a selection of fillers for mechanical clock by Haydn and Mozart are played by Robert Costin on the organ of Sherborne Abbey. Originally built in 1856, this Gray & Davison instrument has undergone extensive adaptation over the years, including having its mechanism adapted to electro-pneumatic action and back again to purely mechanical action! Built over fifty years after the deaths of the featured composers, it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for this repertoire, and it seems unlikely that the classical period composers would have had anything like the choice or types of stops available to Robert Costin. In this respect we are very much in the player’s hands regarding the appropriateness of the timbres he has chosen, and I have to say I am not always entirely persuaded of the authenticity of the sounds chosen here – exacerbated by the generous acoustic, this recording sometimes sounds to me like a Victorian interpretation of classical period music, often sounding a little bit overblown, like later ‘improvements’ on the scores of Handel and Bach. The CD notes suggest an association with Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, sister of CPE Bach’s patron, Frederick the Great, and a musician and composer in her own right, who had an organ installed in her living room in the same year as Bach published his Sonatas. While Bach’s music would also have been intended to meet the growing demands of the concert hall, I think that this inventive music would sound much more effective with the focussed timbres of a smaller instrument. This mismatch of material and instrument comes even more into focus in the slighter repertoire for mechanical clocks, which concludes the CD. While I would personally have preferred the sounds of a less portentous instrument for these Bach Sonatas, Robert Costin plays with refinement and elegance, and we are given a very full account of the details of the chosen instrument. Incidentally, the first of the Bach Sonatas is omitted as it does not appear in the composer’s catalogue – this seems an odd decision as this missing sonata would clearly have completed the set of six Sonatas and filled the CD without resorting to the unrelated and more trivial music for mechanical clock.

D. James Ross

The Brook Street Band
83:44
First Hand Records FHR188

Joseph Gibbs was lucky enough to have been painted by his friend and fellow musician Thomas Gainsborough, a fine portrait reproduced in this CD case, while the programme notes by Tatty Theo, the group’s cellist, perhaps rather ungenerously suggest that it is this association with greatness that has saved Gibbs’ music from obscurity. In fact, although he lived to the ripe old age of 89, he only seems to have published one further collection of music, a set of quartets, and remained a composer of only parochial importance. This seems a shame as these opus 1 Sonatas seem much more than merely competent, and in these sympathetic and imaginative performances by the Brook Street Band they emerge as fine compositions in their own right. The group’s violinist Rachel Harris brings her extensive understanding of the music of this period to bear on Gibbs’ felicitous melodic lines and rhetorical phrases to bring out his unique musical voice. It seems sad that the compositional potential of these promising works was never really fulfilled – perhaps the highly competitive milieu of London at the time, which produced so many masterpieces, was something which Gibbs chose to avoid, preferring local celebrity to an international reputation. In any case, it is lovely to have some fine music persuasively played as a soundtrack to Gainsborough’s vivid portrait of his friend.

D. James Ross