Edited by Peter Holman & Andrew Woolley
Musica Britannica MB110
ISBN: 9780852499757 ISMN: 9790220229183
lix + 156pp, £135.00
Stainer & Bell
This important volume includes music by 14 composers. The first set of airs includes music for “The Tempest” by Matthew Locke and Robert Smith, but the remaining 12 suites are single-composer examples. The others are William Turner, Louis Grabu, Gottfried Finger, Francis Forcer, William Croft, John Eccles, Jeremiah Clarke, James Paisible, William Corbett, John Barrett, possibly Pierre Gillier, and the ever-popular Anonymous. In other words, it’s a veritable who’s who? of Purcellian England.
The music itself is mostly in four parts. Exceptions are Turner’s music for “Pastor Fido, or The Faithful Shepherd” in three parts, and Grabu’s for “Valentinian” in five. Finger added a woodwind solo to the sixth movement of his music for “The Mourning Bride”. The editors have composed a viola part for Forcer’s music in “The Innocent Mistress”. The suites consist of an overture and a sequence of binary dances or airs, the vast majority in what you might call “standard keys”; the four movements in the appendices to the Finger suite are in F minor (only the bass line of the fourth survives), which is the home key of Clarke’s “All for the Better…”
A description of the sources fills more than ten pages. The critical notes, which together with the extensive introduction, are a tribute to the editors, occupy the next 13 pages. I was unable to find an explanation of why they opted to add a viola part to the Forcer suite, but not the Turner. The added trumpet part in Barrett’s “The Albion Queens” is idiomatic and utterly convincing. Another fine volume in this series of international importance.
Brian Clark