Tag: Keyboard music

Colin Tilney harpsichord
62:33
Music & Arts CD-1288

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he steady trickle of new recordings devoted to keyboard music by Byrd continues with this fine selection from the distinguished English musician Colin Tilney who is based in Canada. In this anthology, he investigates Byrd’s copious engagement with polyphony in the varied forms in which he composed for keyboard. On the surface, Tilney surveys dances, variations, fantasias and grounds, but he makes subtle choices, in that Pavana Lachrymae  is both dance and variation, Quadran  is not only dance but also ground, and in one of its sources The seventh pavan is titled Pavana. Canon. 2. pts in one  indicating another aspect of counterpoint within the structure of a dance.

In a selection such as this, with an expressed context, there are always going to be pieces which one might wish that the executant had included. That said, Tilney’s choices from various forms all numerously represented within Byrd’s extensive oeuvre are judicious and in some cases revelatory. For instance, The maiden’s song  is one of Byrd’s least recorded works, yet by drawing attention to it in this contrapuntal context, not just as a bunch of diverting variations on a pleasant old tune, Tilney reveals what a magnificent work this is, both in its construction and effect – he rightly and helpfully draws attention in his booklet notes (in which he gives Byrd’s date of birth as 1543 rather than the now accepted 1539/40) to its “most heavenly” ending – enabling the listener to hear a perhaps unfamiliar and certainly neglected work in a new and shining light.

Tilney’s trick is to balance unhurried tempi with an intense response to each piece, so that there are no gratuitous pyrotechnics, yet the fire in his interpretations is intense. This is particularly true in another relatively neglected work, the intimidating Quadran  pavan and galliard with its jagged dissonances and rhythms which are all of a piece with Byrd’s contrapuntal vision, not one which doggedly pursues counterpoint for its own sake, but in which these harmonic and rhythmic implications are developed to produce a musical narrative or travelogue to enthral and enlighten both the player and the listener.

The two fantasias could not be better chosen to illustrate Byrd’s contrapuntal genius and Tilney’s enlightening response to it. The Fantasia in d is a work of the composer’s maturity, confident in its structure and in the distribution of melodies, rhythms and other devices among the dazzlingly moving parts of the whole. It is slightly surprising that in his booklet Tilney does not mention the possible reference to the plainsong Salve regina  thought by many (but perhaps not CT!) to shape the opening of the Fantasia in d. The Fantasia in a is an early work, Byrd’s (and arguably Europe’s) first keyboard masterpiece, and here as in some of his other fantasias for keyboards and for viols, the raging torrent of ideas and polyphonic techniques has no right at all to come together so compellingly in such a convincing whole. Tilney eschews the repeat at bars 58-61 which is also ignored by Francis Tregian in the Fitzwilliam virginal book, but is given, presumably with some authority as a pupil of Byrd, by Tomkins in the work’s other source. He also makes what feels like the longest pause on disc (there have been many recordings of this challenging tour de force) at the change of tempo in bar 129, but this seems consistent with Tilney’s vision of Byrd’s vision. Which leads to the conclusion that in their respective ways, Colin Tilney and William Byrd are both visionaries.

Richard Turbet

Tasto Solo
58:00
passacaille 1028
Music by Ashton, Cooper, Henry VIII, Preston & anon

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he three members of Tasto Solo play organetto, hammered clavisimbalum and Renaissance harp respectively, and, notwithstanding the name of the group, usually together in ensemble. Any reservations I have about historical evidence that three instruments of this kind ever played music of this kind together are blown away by the sheer musicality and dynamism of Tasto solo’s performances.

Guillermo Pérez’s complete mastery of the organetto means that he can articulate and shape notes like on a recorder, while his fellow performers’ virtuosity on their respective instruments is also stunning. Repertoire which in some performances can sound dead in the water – who has not sat through stultifying renditions of dreary early Tudor music? – comes vividly to life here, while highly imaginative juxtapositions of the different timbres of the instruments and a wonderfully vivid recording make for a winning combination. If you have any familiarity with this repertoire, you will love what these musicians do with it, and – if you don’t – you will just be right royally entertained.

D. James Ross

Aapo Häkkinen
67:31
Alba ABCD 405
+ Gibbons Pavan & Galliard Lord Salisbury

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]wo decades ago, when Davitt Moroney’s boxed set of Byrd’s complete keyboard music was released, there was the worry that it might have the effect of stalling many or indeed any further recordings of this repertory. Thankfully it had the opposite effect, and there has been a steady succession of recordings featuring aspects of Byrd’s output for harpsichord, virginals and organ. One such in 2000 was Music for the Virginals, a fine cross section of Byrd’s oeuvre  played by Aapo Hakkinen (Alba ABCD 148). After what does not seem like as many as seventeen years, he has followed this up with a selection of pieces identified as coming from the later period of Byrd’s career.

It is another judicious combination of reassuringly familiar pieces plus others less well known, all of them of course outstanding compositions. So beside the pavan and galliard sets dedicated to Sir William Petre, 1575-1637 (sic: the later version in Parthenia  from 1612/13, not the version dedicated to “Mr:” Petre in My Lady Nevell’s Book, 1591) and to the now currently fashionable Lord Salisbury (aka Robert Cecil, the King’s Secretary at the time of the Gunpowder Plot) which is also in Parthenia, we have the fine pair in d from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (BK 52), plus the arrangements, paired in one source, of Dowland’s Lachrymae  and James Harding’s Galliard, and the delightful Galliard (BK 77) from Will Forster’s Virginal Book, which could be paired with the Pavan BK 76 (not included here) though they are not placed adjacently by Forster… who is shortly to be identified for the first time, in a forthcoming article by the arch genealogical sleuth John Harley, possibly early next year. Forster is also the source of a setting of Dowland’s If my complaints  which has now been admitted into the Byrd canon not only for its quality but also because an inferior setting in the same source is attributed to Byrd, probably in mistake for this one. Meanwhile Fitzwilliam is also the source of the usually neglected third setting of Monsieur’s Alman  which setting was recognised only relatively recently. There are major sets of variations in the great John come kiss me now  and the less flamboyant Go from my window  alongside the amazing ground The bells  (the ringers at our parish church are practising as I type this) and the now famous Fancy for My Lady Nevell.

The disc concludes with Gibbons’s pavan and galliard also dedicated to Salisbury aka Cecil; no explanation is given for their inclusion on a disc the title of which specifies Byrd. While these fine pieces are in principle always welcome, it is a shame that the opportunity was not taken to include two more pieces by Byrd himself, perhaps even from his peripheral repertory which I mention below.

All the performances are straight out of the top drawer. Hakkinen’s greatest virtue is in his metrical flexibility, not adhering rigidly to the metronome, but never losing his rhythmic or structural grip when responding to the ebb and flow which Byrd builds into his music. This is an ideal recording for anyone test-driving Byrd’s music for the first time, or for any aficionado of Byrd seeking some different slants on how his work is interpreted. This is supposed to be a critical review so, besides my reservation about the inclusion of music by Gibbons, I will scrape up one gripe: many of the recordings of Byrd’s keyboard music since Moroney’s have made for themselves a niche by including at least one piece which does not appear in Moroney’s monumental and comprehensive set – usually a contemporary arrangement for keyboard of a song or consort piece by Byrd. Hakkinen did this on his previous disc, including a contemporary arrangement of Lulla Lullaby. This time he commendably includes the recently accepted If my complaint s but Moroney had already done so in his box. Nevertheless this illustrates the lengths to which this reviewer has to go in order to find anything about which to complain: if my complaints are this trivial, it confirms that Aapo Hakkinen’s disc is simply outstanding.

Richard Turbet
5535