Category: Recording

Categories
Recording

Le Grand Jeu

Le Grand Jeu CD cover for recital of organ arrangements

French Baroque organ favourites
Collection L’Age d’or de l’orgue française No. 4
Gaétan Jarry
65:19
Château de Versailles Spectacles CVS024
Music by d’Angelbert, Charpentier, Corrette, Couperin, Dandrieu, de Grigny, Handel, Lully, Marchand, Purcell & Rameau

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk
CD cover of Gaétan Jarry

Not for the first time, the in-house Versailles CD production team have come up with a disc that isn’t really quite what it says it is, but that might well catch the eye of those browsing in the palace shop, not least because of the picture on the front of the packaging.

Given the working title of ‘French Baroque Organ Favourites,’ I doubt that any EMR-reading organists would have come up with a programme which included Dido’s Lament and/or Handel’s Sheba and in which Corrette out-gunned Couperin by eight and a half minutes to one and a half. And not a Noël in sight. Yes, there is some organ music – the tiny Couperin, more substantial Dandrieu and Grigny – but most of the programme is arrangements principally of Rameau and Lully.

It’s all very well played of course, though some of what we hear wouldn’t be possible without modern recording trickery, and we do get a good trip around the organ’s sound-world (it is a marvellous instrument) but for me that isn’t really the point. You realise how distinctive and rich the true repertoire is when track 4 begins and Dandrieu’s splendid Easter Offertoire succeeds a pair of contredanses by Rameau. The word ‘idiomatic’ sprang to mind, and the organ sounded so much happier.

The booklet essays (French, English & German) are long on gush and short on real information about the music, though there is a useful biography of the organ and some more good pictures. Overall, however, this is not really EMR/HIP material.

David Hansell

Categories
Recording

Buxtehude: Complete Organ Works I

CD cover of Buxtehude Complete Organ Works I Friedhelm Flamme

Friedhelm Flamme
135:50 (2 CDs in a single jewel case)
cpo 555 253-2

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

I was brought up on the renowned Danish organist, Finn Viderø’s recordings of Buxtehude which he made in the 1950s, largely on the 1942 Marcussen organ in the Klosterkirche at Sorø, Denmark. They were notable for their clarity and rhythmic precision, and while he did not use a historic instrument, the Marcussen organ there was an early example of a mechanical action instrument designed on werkprinzip lines and the recordings were energetic and crystal clear – as an elderly and rather mannered schoolmaster once said to me, ‘absolutely spiffing – no smudge!’

Fashions have changed, and organists now search out historic instruments appropriate to the style of the music they wish to record. I find then slightly curious that for the first two CDs in a new complete Buxtehude – and maybe for them all – the accomplished organist, Friedhelm Flamme, should choose the Christoph Treutmann Orgel (1734-7) in the Klosterkirche Grauhof, near Goslar. It is a favourite organ of his and he has recorded both Michael Praetorius and Vincent Lübeck there.

But this instrument postdates Buxtehude, and it definitely not in the North German style. It seems to have been chosen largely because is has – as had the organ in St Mary’s Lübeck since 1685 – a well-tempered tuning, and so makes the playing of some of Buxtehude’s works in more remote keys like E major and F# minor less astringent. It stands in a large Baroque Augustinian abbey built by an Italian architect from Lombardy between 1711 and 1717, and, although Treutmann had worked with the Schnitgers in north Germany, the sound in the resonant acoustic feels more like a southern German instrument to me. There are a number of string and flute stops that increase this sense of a later Baroque sonority, as well as the fine 32’ Posaune, mentioned in a laudatory contemporary review of the organ by Johann Hemann Biermann, where he says, ‘The structure and outline of this very magnificent and precious work presents itself to the eye as noble and lively beyond all measure. […] It also possesses an all the more pervasive harmony and corresonance (sic), so that it might well brook comparison with a thunderstorm rumbling in the air, namely, when the Posaune 32’ bass is added.’ It is indeed very fine, and, like all the pedal reeds, speaks extremely promptly; if he were recording the organ works of Pachelbel, for example, I might well have applauded his choice of instrument.

The 32’ Posaune is used in the pedal solo of the opening piece, the Praeludium, Fuge und Ciacona in C (BuxWV 137), and it is difficult to hear anything else with any clarity when it is drawn. But Flamme then uses it moderately sparingly, and so allows us to hear the way the other ranks – especially the foundation stops – combine to create a range of more subtle effects in the chorale preludes.

Each CD is planned as a complete recital in itself, with pieces chosen for their related keys. This makes for good listening, but make it harder to follow with a score. On the first CD, the Partita on Auf meinen lieben Gott (BuxWV 179) brings welcome relief before we plunge back into the E minor Ciacona, with all four pedal reeds throughout against the principal choruses of the coupled Hauptwerck and Oberwerck.  The complex three-section prelude on Ich dank dir schon durch deinen Sohn (BuxVW 195) is splendidly played, with a light 8’ pedal, and some of the preludes and fugues have an equally light registration – again the clarity of the pedal flues as well as the reeds shows to great advantage.

In the second CD, after the Toccata in D minor with its contrasting sections and multiple changes of manuals and registrations, we hear Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin (BuxWV 75), Buxtehude’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis with its canonically complex variations, written in memory of his father and capable of multiple performance possibilities, including with voices and viols. I do not much care for his D minor Passacaglia (BuxWV 161) with its nightingale effects, but again we hear what the organ is capable of.

The F major Toccata (BuxWV 157) shows Flamme playing these showy but harmonically simple pieces with the rich 16’ and 8’ manual reeds, and he follows this by small-scale manualiter canzonettas and fugues, sometimes based on 4’ pitch. The disc ends with the amazing Praeludium in E, with its rich chromatics, demonstrating the need for a well-tempered instrument, that influenced his choice of the Klosterkirche Grauhof Treutmann instrument.

On the showing of these first two CDs, this will be a significant series, challenging other established complete organ works by Vogel, Bryndorf and others who chose to play on more recognisably Danish/North German instruments. While it deserves a warm welcome, the choice of instrument(s) matters as well as the playing. Has Flamme in his search for a colourful instrument thought of using the stunningly re-habilitated Stellwagen organ (1659) in St Mary’s Straslund for Buxtehude? It was Stellwagen who rebuilt the Totentanz organ in St Mary’s, Lübeck in 1653 and worked on the large organ there that Buxtehude played as well, so there would be a good historical reason, even if it has a not very extreme meantone temperament. However, in the booklet, there is a good essay on the Treutmann organ and its history, an introduction to the style and development of Buxtehude’s writing and in particular, the detailed registration chosen for each movement of each work. This is a great help to the listener, particularly when the monumental sound threatens to obscure some of the finer points of both the music and the playing.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

F. Couperin: Complete works for harpsichord

CD cover 10 CD box set Couperin complete harpsichord music Carole Cerasi

Carole Cerasi with James Johnstone harpsichord & Reiko Ichise gamba
Metronome METCD 1100 (10 CDs in a box)

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

To record and release the whole of Couperin’s seminal Harpsichord oeuvre is an astonishing act of faith and dedication. The lock-down times give amateurs (in the French sense) the chance to get to grips with and reappraise this amazing corpus of music which more than any that I know gives us a feel for what makes French music of the late seventeenth century so very distinctive.

Apart from L’Art de Toucher le Clavecin (1716), Couperin’s pieces are arranged in twenty-seven Ordres, each grounded in a particular key, but avoiding the tight structure of the Bach suites, where the formal series of dances provide a recognised structure. With Couperin we are in a looser, more wayward structure of movements with a more programmatic feel: the fascinating titles given to some pieces reveal the background in a theatrical imagination where reality is miniaturised, life-changing experiences immortalised in particularity and the trivial glimpse turned into an epigrammatic memorial. While Les Langeurs-Tendres in the Sixième Ordre is a classic bit of descriptive mood music, no-one really knows to what Les Baricades Mistérieuses refers. La Triomphante that opens the Dixième Ordre could not rattle the sabres more, while Le Petit-Rien is just what it says – a few insouciant bars of delight, ending the Quatorzième Ordre, with its birdsong pieces and the softly jangling bell-like notes of Le Carillon de Cythère.

Some of the most evocative pieces are written in the resonant tenor range which is so characteristic of Couperin’s style, like Les Ondes that concludes the Cinquième Ordre. But what makes or mars any recording of Couperin’s music are two factors: first, the player’s familiarity with the keyboard style of the period, where ornaments and their languid execution as well as the conventions of notation are so important for whether the playing feels French and second, the choice of instrument(s). For those who would like to sample Cerasi’s skills and sensibilities, I suggest they turn to CD 9.7-11, where they will hear not only Le Point du jour, L’Anguille and the Menuets Croisès but also her skill and immaculate sense of timing in the halting, sliding Le Croc-en-jambe and the magician’s sleight of hand in Les Tours de Passe-passe. I was brought up on Kenneth Gilbert’s recordings of Couperin, made in the 1970s, and it is largely his editions of the Ordres that I still use. But Cerasi’s playing has a grace, a flexibility and a subtle freedom, devoid of tiresome and faddish mannerisms, that I admire greatly. Cerasi is ably partnered in those pieces requiring two clavecins by her producer in this outstanding enterprise, James Johnstone.

For the instruments, she chooses a series of harpsichords, beginning with the Ruckers of 1636 that underwent a makeover by Henri Hemsch of Paris in 1763 in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands and ending with a splendid Antoine Vater of 1738 that seems to live in a private house in Ireland – now there’s a ray of hope in a dark world! The instruments – including the modern ones by Philippe Humeau (1989) after Vater 1738 and Keith Hill (2010) after a Taskin of 1769 – are all suitably French sounding and are all pitched at 415. I haven’t wearied of the wonderful sounds she coaxes from each harpsichord – so different in the languorous slow movements and so bright and fiery at times in the rondeaux, even after listening to the 10 CDs several times, and I don’t think they could be bettered: they certainly sing out better than those used by Kenneth Gilbert in the 1970s. Each instrument is illustrated in the accompanying notes, although ideally I would have liked more information on a website if not in the booklet, particularly on the 1738 Vater from Ireland, which sounds quite wonderful. Nor is there information on the temperament used: the keys are delightfully differentiated – the Eb and C minor are particularly dark and velvety, so my guess is that it is a sixth or fifth comma meantone system. But I trust Cerasi’s scholarship and research to know what was likely in Paris in the first quarter of the 18th century.

The main content of the booklet is an excellent essay, 21 columns long, by Nicholas Anderson, in both English and French. It manages to set Couperin’s oeuvre in its historical, visual and theatrical context, alert us to some of the more recent scholarship and writing and give us a feel for the distinctive nature of each Ordre – no mean achievement in this highly condensed format.

Each CD has a card sleeve with the content and timings of each piece listed on the back, and I am amazed and delighted in equal measure that it has been possible to issue the whole of this project for under £45.00. I don’t expect ever to hear a more thoughtful and intense yet playful and elegant version of Couperin’s great works, and Carole Cerasi has us all in her debt. Buy it at once, even if you’ve never heard more than a handful of these works before. This is all pure gold, and I know no better introduction to the French style than this.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

The Dark Lord’s Music

Martin Eastwell plays 17th-century lute music

The Lutebook of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648)
Martin Eastwell
77:41
Music & Media MMC117
Music by Batcheler, Cato, Despond, Dowland, Du Gast, Gauthier, Hely, Edward Lord Herbert, Johnson & Reys

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582-1648), brother of the poet George Herbert, was a significant figure in England in the early part of the 17th century, and was known as “The Dark Lord Herbert”. In his interesting and informative liner notes, Martin Eastwell describes Lord Herbert as diplomat, soldier, courtier, philosopher, poet, historian, musician and author of an entertaining autobiography. His lutebook was compiled over a number of years up to 1640 and contains music by the most important composers of that period: Robert Johnson, John Dowland, Daniel Batcheler, Diomedes Cato, Jakob Reys, and others. If Lord Herbert could get his hands round all the pieces in his book, he must have been a very accomplished lutenist.
 
The CD opens with a Prelude, the first of four pieces by Jakob Reys. The opening theme, which goes down a tone, up a minor third, and down a semitone, creates a mood of unease. After exploring various polyphonic options, the music breaks into a flurry of semiquavers and ends with a few solemn chords. Eastwell’s interpretation involves a fair amount of rhythmic freedom. In bar 30, using his musical common sense, he wisely plays quavers instead of the crotchets which appear in the manuscript and in Piotr Pozniak’s edition. Reys’ Sarabande (track 3) came as a pleasant surprise. The first section consists mainly of chords, including an unexpected flattened seventh chord in bar 2, and Eastwell strums them, as if playing a baroque guitar. Whether or not that was intended by the composer is a moot point, but I like it, since it effectively captures the spirit of the lively saraband, before it almost ground to a halt in the 18th century.
 
The only piece by John Dowland included here, is his galliard derived from Daniel Batcheler’s song “To plead my faith”. It displays a variety of techniques: broken chords, fast running quaver divisions now in the treble now in the bass, sequences of jerky dotted notes, and cadential trills. Eastwell adds a few tasteful ornaments of his own, and keeps a steady unhurried pace.
 
The longest track, at 9’ 49”, is one of five pieces by Daniel Batcheler – seven variations on “Une jeune fillette”, also known as La Monica. It is a most extraordinary piece of music, with considerable variety, and reflects the skill and imagination of one of England’s greatest lutenist-composers. Again, Eastwell chooses an unhurried speed, giving the listener a chance to savour his expressive playing. There are no ornaments in Herbert’s setting, but the ones Eastwell adds are spot on, enhancing the overall effect.
 
There are two tracks of music by Cuthbert Hely, whose music survives only in Lord Herbert’s manuscript. The first is a sombre Fantasia nominally in F minor, where much of the music is played on the lowest strings – not until bar 10 does it go above the fourth course. In the slow-moving polyphony, there seems to be a note missing in bar 72.
 
It may surprise some, but Eastwell has dispensed with the services of producers and recording engineers, and done the work himself. So often in my reviews, I have complained about microphones being too close to the lute, which can produce a sharp, unpleasant tone, and which does not reflect the soft, warm tone of a well-played lute. Eastwell has experimented with how best to record a lute, in particular where the microphone should be in relation to the lute, and the result is very impressive. Obtrusive string noise and heavy breathing are reduced.
 
Eastwell uses two 10-course lutes, one by Martin Haycock after Hans Frei, the other by Tony Johnson after Sixtus Rauwolf. Both lutes are strung in gut. Bass strings made of pure gut can sound rather dull, and modern wound strings have too much sustain. In his liner notes Eastwell explains that there is some evidence that bass strings at Herbert’s time were treated with metallic salts to increase density and improve the response. For the present CD, he uses such strings, which were made by Mimmo Peruffo, and the result is most satisfying.
 
Unlike so many of today’s “thumb-inside” players, Eastwell plays with his right thumb outside, which is appropriate for the period. In his notes, he refers to the manuscript of Johann Stobäus (a contemporary of Lord Herbert), who argues that playing with the thumb outside sounds purer, sharper, and brighter, whereas playing with the thumb inside sounds rotten and muffled. Thumb-outside certainly works better for lutes with many courses, and is more effective for music where the melody goes down to low strings.
 
The CD finishes with a Pavan composed by Lord Herbert himself. It is a gloomy piece in the unusual key of E flat minor. There are strange, unfamiliar chords with few open strings, and much of the time the music is played on low strings – in the first section there are only two notes to be played on the first course, and in the third section the last ten bars of 16 avoid the first course altogether. Dark music indeed for the Dark Lord.
 
Stewart McCoy
 
 
 
Categories
Recording

F. Couperin: Complete works for organ

CD cover of James Johnstone Complete works for organ Francois Couperin

James Johnstone Tribuot Organ 1699 Seurre
100:59 (2 CDs in a card triptych)
Metronome METCD 1098 & 1099
+ Jean-Henri d’Angelbert: Complete works for organ

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

In earlier reviews of James Johnstone’s organ playing, I have commented on the importance of finding a characteristic and appropriate instrument on which to perform the music, and this recording of the Couperin organ masses follows this tradition splendidly. The organ is neither well-known nor very large but turns out to be a gem by the Parisian builder Julien Tribuot. It was built for the Cistercian Abbey of Maizières in 1699 and was mercifully preserved when the abbey was dissolved by being sold in 1791 to the parish of Seurre on the Saône, where obscurity saved it from 19th- and 20th-century ‘improvements’, until its careful rehabilitation by Bernard Aubertin in 1991.

Like much else in the French organ music of the period, conventions for registration were detailed and highly prescriptive. Only on a French organ of the period can you hope to reproduce the required sounds with any accuracy and only a player who understands the conventions of notation and ornamentation in the period will get it feeling right.

I bought the L’Oiseau-Lyre edition of the Couperin Masses in October 1958 from UMP, and I remember struggling through some of it in a break-out room when a voice over my shoulder said, ‘No-one has taught you how to play this, have they?’ That was the legendary Felix Aprahamian, music critic and friend of Poulenc and Messiaen, who introduced me to the conventions of the ornaments and notes inégales, and fixed for me to go and play the Cliquot organ in Poitiers Cathedral. So my admiration for James Johnstone’s choice of instrument, disciplined approach to the registration and strict observance of the conventions of rhythm and ornamentation knows no bounds: he plays this repertoire with a detailed knowledge of the style on an appropriate organ that I’ve never heard before in an acoustic that allows the detail and flexible rhythms of his inégales to be appreciated and enjoyed.

This time too he has included not just the details of the specification of the organ in his booklet, but also full details of the registration for each movement on his website (www.jamesjohnstone.org). The pedal organ characteristically has reeds at 8’and 4’ pitch for use with the Plein Jeu and otherwise an 8’ flute; the 3rd and 4th manuals (Récit and Écho) have but a single stop on each – a five-rank cornet. We never hear the Écho cornet, and the flute on the Pedale is surprisingly insubstantial – it is a reconstruction, and I had expected something with a little more body for the bass of the movements en taille, but the robust Cromorne on the Positif en Dos is splendid and makes a surprisingly adequate balance with the Trompette and Clairon of the Grand-Orgue in the dialogue movements.

It is by the fluid rhythms of the recits en taille that I think players of this repertoire – which looks so plain on paper until it is brought to life by a player who has the conventions of late 17th- and early 18th-century French music in his bones – should be judged, and I think Johnstone has it. In his monograph French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV (CUP 2011), David Ponsford analyses in great detail the genesis and development of the genres of the music of this repertoire, and shows how the styles relate to the quest in France for a living, breathing style that was capable of human emotion and expression.

This recording offers a perfect worked example, and I am very glad to have heard it. It is neatly produced and edited by Carole Cerasi, the harpsichordist and a fellow professor of Johnstone’s at the Guildhall. I particularly value Johnstone’s nose for sniffing out such high-quality, lesser-known instruments, and look forward to further discoveries for his Bach series.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Buxtehude: Cantates pour voix seule

Cantatas for solo voice Buxtehude La Rêveuse

La Rêveuse, Maïlys de Villoutreys, Florence Bolton & Benjamin Perrot
65:00
MIRARE MIR442

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

The music on this CD places Buxtehude between his predecessor at the Marienkirche in Lübeck, Franz Tunder (1614-1667) and some of his contemporaries – Johann Philipp Förtsch (1652-1732), Gabriel Schütz (1633-1710/11) and Christian Geist (c.1650-1711). The other thread is that six of the nine pieces come from that remarkable source of almost all of Buxtehude’s substantial vocal output, the Düben Collection. Assembled for the Swedish Court and now in the University Library in Uppsala, the collection is a reminder that the Hanseatic League, trading around ports on the Baltic, was a powerful system of international connections before the narrower nationalism of the late 17th century took root.

The cantatas and their interleaving sonatas are played in an intelligent and well-mannered way by La Rêveuse, a Parisian/Breton ensemble which can boast two violins, dessus, tenor and three basse de violes, harpsichord, organ (a five rank positif by Dominique Thomas 2012 in the Église Protestant in Paris) and theorbo. Six of the items are solo cantatas with the Breton soprano Maïlys de Villoutreys, who sings cleanly and clearly, avoiding excessive vibrato but well able to colour her singing appropriately.

This CD is a welcome insight into the North German school pre-Bach, tastefully performed. The music lets us hear the kind of repertoire that Buxtehude lived among and which no doubt figured in the famous Abendmusiken in Lübeck. The influence of Italy is present in the stile moderna traits of some of the vocal settings and in the instrumental sinfonias between some episodes, recalling the operas and oratorios of Cavalli and Carissimi and the last piece, Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab, is built on a recurring ostinato bass. I listened to the whole recital with great pleasure: the music is well-chosen, nothing jars in the disciplined but relaxed performance, and it is a good advertisement for the group’s commitment to an under-explored repertoire.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Bach: Toccatas [BWV910-916]

Bach toccatas Masaaki Suzuki CD

Masaaki Suzuki harpsichord
69:04
BIS-2221 SACD

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

The set of ‘Six toccatas, for the clavir’ mentioned in the 1750 catalogue seems to have been among Bach’s early compositions. No autograph copy survives, but copies of older versions of BWV 912 and 913 existing in Johann Sebastian’s older brother’s hand seem to date from around 1704. Christoph Wolff dates the revised set of six – a set like the Sei Soli or the French and English Suites – to around 1707-8, with the G major BWV 916, with its distinctive and Italianate concerto three-movement structure, added or linked to them in around 1710. The earlier Sei are more truly in the North German style, with opening flourishes and some solid homophonic chords that establish the tonality, followed by the first of the fugati, then a slower passage of a more truly melodic type before a further fugue that leads to a conclusion. So, although the pieces appear to be extended improvisations and are marked manualiter, they follow the models that culminate in Buxtehude’s great pedaliter organ works, whether described at toccatas or not.

These pieces bear all the hallmarks of the improvisatory style of the truly instrumental stylus fantasticus, as Athanasius Kircher calls it. This kind of improvisatory composition, free from the constraints of setting a text or a descriptive programme, is therefore able to reflect the composer’s immediate response to his circumstances like the instrument he had been asked to test or the mood he was in. In England, these became known as fantasias, whether for keyboard or groups of viols, while the generic title for Bach’s semi-improvisatory works is toccata.

You can imagine Johann Sebastian being asked to try out a new harpsichord and using the traditional passagework with runs and arpeggios to test the evenness of the instrument throughout its range leading to more chordal sections to test the resonance; fugal sections test the clarity of the instrument in part-writing and somewhere there will be a more melodic passage to see how well it sings. Later these elements would be refined to the Prelude and Fugue that formed the more disciplined structure of the components of the 48, but at this stage earlier compositional models were being explored.

Suzuki is a seasoned keyboard performer, though better known for directing his Bach Collegium Japan and for being the source and inspiration behind the complete set of cantata recordings, secular as well as sacred. The best historically informed practice underscores his playing, and this is a mature, relaxed and apparently effortless performance. Arpeggios and arabesques are tossed off, fugues are shaped with a clarity of articulation that shows he understands their deep structure and under his hands the instrument – a copy of a substantial two-manual Ruckers by Willem Kroesbergen of Utrecht in 1982 – is coaxed into singing rather than hammered into jangling. This is as good an introduction to Suzuki’s keyboard playing as any and we can appreciate his musicianship at work in these complex and varied works.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Bach: Harpsichord music

Tilman Skowroneck plays Bach CD cover

Tilman Skowroneck harpsichord
69:03
TYXart TXA19133

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk

This recital by Tilman Skowroneck, a former pupil of – amongst others – Gustav Leonhardt, marks his homage to a fine instrument built by his father Martin Skowroneck in 1976 and to Leonhardt himself.

The harpsichord was first installed in a mansion in Baltimore, where the teenage Tilman remembers seeing it set up on temporary cavaletti, but then bought back after its owners’ demise by Martin in 2009 and re-installed in what was Martin’s (and is now Tilman’s) music room in Bremen. It is a copy of a Christian Zell now in Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe dated 1728. It was re-quilled before this recording, and the light voicing of I suppose the upper rank makes it a very suitable choice for the version of the E-flat lute sonata BWV 998, which Bach marked ‘for lute or harpsichord’ on the title page of the autograph and can be dated around the mid 1730s. As well as the sixth of the English Suites, Skowroneck plays a transcription of the violin partita in D minor (BWV 1004) taking it down a fifth into G minor, which was a favourite piece of his for recitals. Leonhardt made these transcriptions in the spirit of Johann Sebastian arranging some earlier violin concerti for harpsichord for performance at the Leipzig Collegium Musicum evenings and Bärenreiter now publishes them; but Tilman made and plays his own version, transcribing Leonhardt’s published recording, for performance at a series of memorial concerts for Leonhardt after his death in 2012.

The instrument is certainly very easy to listen to. It is pitched at A=415 and tuned to a ‘modified Temperament Ordinaire’. This tuning certainly favours the flat keys of the chosen pieces. There is an odd resonance to the tenor F sharp, which I find rather distracting; at first, I thought it was my mobile phone buzzing in my pocket, but it is definitely that particular note on the instrument.

Tilman plays persuasively, and is a member of the stroking rather than hammering brigade, so his CD is easy to listen to, and a fine tribute to his father’s craftsmanship and his mentor’s musicianship. The music he has chosen is not frequently recorded, which makes the CD of more than usual interest. His website contains further information and has clips of more recent recordings of French music.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Sheppard: Media vita in morte sumus

Alamire, Skinner, Sheppard: In media vita

Alamire, David Skinner
16:30
Inventa INV1003

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk (from July 17th!)

“Beyond glorious … monumental”. These words are used by David Skinner, director of Alamire, in his notes accompanying this recording, to describe – without one atom of exaggeration – the music of John Sheppard in general and his antiphon Media vita in morte sumus in particular. Another word, sublime, has been worked near to death (sic) in recent decades, but in its essential meaning it too applies to this work. Indeed, no praise can be too high for this musical creation. It is one of those few works that one feels could almost represent Creation itself. It has been recorded a number of times over recent decades by a variety of distinguished ensembles, and here, another of the finest choirs in the realm performs this incomparable masterpiece, but in a new version never before recorded. At just over sixteen measured but purposeful minutes it is about half the length of the longest rendition of the hitherto accepted format, a riveting tour de force by the Choir of Westminster Cathedral (Hyperion CDA68187). And this is the point: between themselves, as David explains in his excellent notes, he and two other distinguished musicologists, Jason Smart and John Harper, have arrived at the conclusion that Sheppard’s musical volcano should consist of fewer repetitions than the version hitherto accepted and recorded, not shedding any of the actual music and retaining much of the chant, simply ordered differently. The recording itself dates from 2012, when Alamire was involved in a project for BBC television which featured an eminent historian who, in the current cultural climate, cannot be named (clue: he is No Relation of The Beatles’ drummer) but a commercial recording was not released at the time. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and reworking of the audio files, from what was the previously accepted version, “happened during the Covid-19 lockdown” resulting in this premiere of what could well be the version of his masterwork that Sheppard might have expected to hear. Notwithstanding the evidence imparted by David, it is perhaps not impossible that there will be those who maintain the integrity of the previously accepted format. Pace David’s surprising defensiveness about “maintaining balance and interest [reviewer’s italics] in modern performance” – surely this is music of the spheres, that should be continuous and without end – this new dispensation deprives the listener of some repetitions of Sheppard’s heavenly polyphony, but then again one can always repeat the new version! Indeed, the revised format might make the work more accessible to choirs cautious about programming a single work from the 16thcentury that usually lasts 20-30 minutes. Alamire’s performance is excellent; for a choir which, as its director observes, “tend[s] to lean towards those darker sonorities” there could have been more pneumatic drill from the basses, but given the dimensions of the choir and the acoustic in which they were recorded, the pacing and blend are fine. In terms of the value of the music and the quality of the performance, not to mention the considerable amount of research behind it, this recording is a snip. It is recommended without hesitation. Don’t even wait just a minute – buy it now.

Richard Turbet

Categories
Recording

In chains of gold: The English pre-Reformation verse anthem, volume 2

English pre-Restoration verse anthems Byrd Bull Hooper Mundy CD cover

William Byrd to Edmund Hooper: psalms and royal anthems
Magdalena Consort, Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, Silas Wollston organ
70:29
Signum Classics SIGCD609

Byrd: Hear my prayer, O Lord rebuke me not, Have mercy upon me O God Fantasia BK46, Teach me O Lord, Christ rising again, I will give laud, Look and bow down Bull: Almighty God which by the leading of a star, Fantasia MB 16, Deliver me O Go. Cosyn: Voluntaries 1 and 3 Morley: Out of the deep Hooper: Hearken ye nations, O God of gods John Mundy: Sing joyfully

We were lucky enough to receive two copies of this recording for review, and here are the two reactions to it. Firstly (in the order in which they arrived in my inbox!), Richard Turbet then David Stancliffe.

This is the second volume in the series which began with a well-received disc of all the surviving consort anthems by Orlando Gibbons. It features Byrd, plus his pupils Morley and Bull, and their contemporaries Edmund Hooper and John Mundy, with organ solos by Benjamin Cosyn. The music itself is varied and of the highest quality, the performers are among the finest in this repertory, the scholarship behind it is in the distinguished hands of Andrew Johnstone whose doctoral thesis is on Byrd’s Anglican music, and the artistic director is Bill Hunt, founder-member of Fretwork who, at the time of writing, is engaged upon a doctoral thesis about consort anthems.

The proceedings get off to the best possible start with the first of three Byrd premieres: Byrd’s oeuvre runs to well over five hundred works, and his entire repertories of Latin, keyboard and consort music have been recorded. However, there are many gaps in the English-texted music, both sacred – liturgical as well as domestic – and secular. Hear my prayer, O Lord is one of Byrd’s three surviving verse anthems (with an accompaniment for the organ and therefore intended for use in the Anglican liturgy) but Andrew Johnstone feels that he has evidence that it originated as a consort anthem, with an accompaniment for viols indicating domestic performance. Although this is open to interpretation, it is entirely appropriate to be open to alternative possibilities and to air them in a project such as this. In any event, this piece is a gem and its eventual appearance on a commercial recording is greatly to be welcomed. O Lord rebuke me not is the second of Byrd’s surviving liturgical verse anthems on this disc, and again Andrew Johnstone feels that there is evidence of domestic origins. There have been a couple of previous recordings of it with an organ by cathedral choirs (Salisbury and Lichfield), but it is no less welcome here in this experimental – and, who knows, perhaps authentic – guise. The third of Byrd’s trio of surviving liturgical verse anthems Teach me O Lord is performed as such, with organ, but with an intriguing slant to its interpretation. The verse is in triple time, and the chorus in duple. Normally this is performed as dotted semibreve = semibreve when passing from verse to chorus (with the reverse from chorus to verse), as in volume 10a of The Byrd Edition (p. 43 passim) or simply retaining the value of each note, i.e. semibreve = semibreve. In this recording the verse and chorus are rendered with a proportional relationship between the triple and duple sections, resulting in the verse being sung much more briskly than is usually the case. Having recovered from the initial surprise and listened several times, I am still not convinced, but none of us were there at the time, Byrd’s manuscript does not survive, contemporary sources are inconsistent, and insufficient research has been published, so it is again thoroughly worthwhile to use this recording as a vehicle for such an experiment.

The second of Byrd’s premieres is I will give laud, one of several fragmentary songs that survive in a lutebook from the Paston collection from which crucial parts are missing, hence their skeletal appearance in volume 16 of The Byrd Edition. Andrew Johnstone has done heroic work in making this song performable, and there is word of a forthcoming publication containing several other such Byrd reconstructions. The text is the usual excruciating paraphrase of a psalm, in this case the luckless XXXIV, perpetrated by Thomas Sternhold, and the form is ten verses sung by a soloist in the measure of a galliard, accompanied by a quintet of viols, with a chorus repeating the final two lines of alternate verses.

The third of the trio of Byrd premieres is the majestic Look and bow down. Byrd, who was what we would nowadays call the Master of the Queen’s Musick, sets a poem by Queen Elizabeth thanking God for assisting mainly Herself in seeing off the Spanish Armada in 1588. Again, major reconstructive musical surgery was required from Andrew Johnstone. (At least two previous attempts, by experts on respectively Byrd and the Paston sources, had been made, to try to create a performable song out of the intractable fragments.) It was first sung outside St Paul’s Cathedral, so the decision was taken for this recording to use an accompaniment of winds, as would have been the practice at the time. Mean and triplex soloists respectively sing the first two verses, the final lines echoed by the chorus, then the soloists join together in the final verse, to make a glorious conclusion with the four wind instruments, the organ and, for the repetition of the final couplet, all the available singers. The resulting sound is magnificent, with the prevailing dignified minor tonality giving way to a moving evocation of “The soul of me his turtledove” in the final line.

That concludes the Byrd half of the disc, and it is followed by Bull’s famous Starre Anthem and Deliver me, O God, another premiere, which is set to a text said also to be by the Queen celebrating the defeat of the Armada. Towards the end of the record are two powerful anthems by Edmund Hooper, a fine composer who seems to have been neglected simply because of the sheer number of gifted contemporaries. He is no less gifted than most of them, however, and although there is a fine recording of his services and anthems by The Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge under Andrew Gant (Lammas LAMM 096D), these two works receive their premieres on the present disc. Hearken ye nations is a bracingly grumpy work which loquaciously celebrates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, while O God of gods was composed for the Accession Day of James I as king of England and, like Byrd’s Look and bow down, ropes in winds, a substantial chorus, and even a session musician on tenor dulcian, to bring the proceedings to an appropriately regal conclusion.

All the other pieces on this disc – the better-known anthems needing less editorial labour and the works for organ – go towards making this a most attractive and enthralling programme, supported by a booklet that is both scholarly and readable. From an engineering point of view, just occasionally the second vocal line down could have been given more presence (such as in the third verse of Look and bow down), otherwise this recording sounds as elevated as the quality of the music it presents. The performances leave nothing to be desired. The viols and wind are, as I have already said, the top of their profession. All the singers are excellent, among whom Elisabeth Paul and Zoe Brookshaw (“mean” and “triplex”) have prominent roles. But every individual performer, alongside their technical and musicological colleagues, has been crucial in making this an outstanding disc.

Richard Turbet

This is the second volume of Bill Hunt’s great project to edit and record the corpus of pre-Restoration Verse Anthems, of which Volume 1, focussing on Gibbons, appeared in 2018 and was reviewed in January of that year.

This second volume has a wonderful range of music starting with William Byrd and moving through John Bull and Thomas Morley, interspersed with short voluntaries for the organ by Benjamin Cosyn, to John Mundy and the great discovery for me – Edmund Hooper, whom I only knew as the composer of a set of evensong canticles. Three of Byrd’s penitential psalms begin the programme, and after Teach me, O Lord, Christ rising again and I will give laud (a splendid five-part reconstruction by Andrew Johnstone of a swinging lyric rather in the manner of Though Amaryllis dance in green), comes Look and bow down, a setting of words by Queen Elizabeth herself which was ‘performed at Sainte Pauls crosse in London’. It is accompanied by cornets and sackbuts on this recording as in all probability it was sung outside the cathedral after the Bishop of Salisbury’s sermon at the conclusion of the service to give thanks for deliverance from the Spanish Armada.

One of the welcome features of this distinguished recording is the care taken to make the texts clearly audible. This is where the Reformation concern for the clarity and audibility of the text and the musical seconda prattica championed by Monteverdi and the composers of the new dramatic word-settings emanating from Italy coincided. I particularly enjoyed the Magdalena Consort’s director Peter Harvey articulating the bass verses in John Mundy’s Sing Joyfully with such clarity and feeling: it is not always easy to make the bass part in such music melodically interesting as well as so wonderfully resonant. His rock-steady pitching against which the other voices can tune is a model for this kind of consort singing. For drama, I admired Benedict and Hugo Hymas’ passionate declamation and articulation of the expressive words – again possibly by Queen Elizabeth – in Bull’s Deliver me, O God, which follows his well-known ‘Starre Anthem’.

The ensemble singing is outstanding. This struck me most forcibly when the full voices entered after Elizabeth Paul’s opening verse with the viols in Byrd’s O Lord, rebuke me not. Breathing as one, the singers with the admirable Eleanor Minney on top contrive an organ-like unanimity of sound that contrasts with the single voice verse. Such alternation between a single voice with viols and this rich homophonic sound is a characteristic of the verse anthem genre, and throws the text into prominence by repeating it word for word. Only Andrew Johnstone’s illuminating note on the Byrd settings reveals that he is the reconstructing detective of several of these pieces, so imperceptible is his skilful hand, and I look forward to many of his Byrd reconstructions coming into the public domain.

While the singing is agile as well as rich (listen to the nimble rhythms in Christ rising again), the playing is equally elegant. Fretwork shares the bulk of it, and their sinuous lines weave a magical backdrop to the voices. Mostly the singers pick up a responsive style – much of this is music for private chapels and long galleries rather than the formal worship of church services, so a reflective, understated style is called for in many pieces. To my mind, only Zoë Brookshaw sometimes sings with too much vibrato on unimportant notes; otherwise, the singers vary their style between verse and chorus very perceptively.

But the real triumph of this project is to unite scholarship, performance practice and passionate music-making. Often two of these three are fulfilled, but rarely all three. You can sense the energy and passion in the project from the commitment of the musicians, all skilled practitioners in their fields. But behind them stand Andrew Johnstone and Bill Hunt – the presiding genius. And as always with Bill’s projects, there are unanswered questions: for me, the one I hope to pursue is that about the music desk in Bishop Andrewes’ chapel. I have a very clear memory of an enclosed pew with a central desk on the right-hand side of the chapel at Wolvsey, the palace of the Bishops of Winchester near the cathedral in Winchester. Am I right in thinking that this might well have held a consort of viols? Certainly, the substantial mediaeval chapel with its distinctive ‘Laudian’ fittings has never, as far as I know, had an organ.

To raise more questions than you answer and to excite your followers with the same passion to find out more is the mark of all inspired educators, and this CD is with its splendid notes is a fine example of that.

David Stancliffe