Lux Musicæ London
58:00
First Hand Records FHR137
I was blissfully unaware of the fundamental effect a recording by David Munrow and his Morley Consort of Morley’s Consort Lessons of 1599 featuring extended divisions had had on a teenage me until I invested in the CD version some forty years later and realised that it had truly entered my bloodstream and become the basis of most of my embellishment instincts throughout a subsequent lifetime of playing Renaissance music. I would like to think this delightful CD might have the same effect on young performers, and indeed this ambition is expressed towards the end of the programme note. Lux Musicae (harpist Aileen Henry, recorder player Mirjam-Luise Münzel and lutanist Toby Carr) deftly take us through a selection of ‘written out’ embellishments of Renaissance and Baroque pieces as well as applying the wisdom of various embellishment instruction books of the period to other pieces. The results could so easily have sounded ‘worthy’, but in the hands of these gifted musicians the music comes wonderfully to life, and we are given a little flavour of how embellishment became such an indispensable skill for musicians of this period. The witty reference to the madrigal Vestiva i colli providing the title of the CD and alluding to the idea of flowers clothing the mountains much as embellishment clothes the original scores is indeed pertinent. Mirjam-Luise Münzel employs recorders based on illustrations by Ganassi. It was the purchase in the 1970s of a facsimile of Ganassi’s Fontegara (1535), a recorder tutor and one of the main sources of manners of embellishment, that first opened my eyes to the complexities of Renaissance ornamentation. I have yet to hear the more outrageous suggestions in this publication such as trills on thirds and fourths and dense diminutions of original phrases put into practice – perhaps they were never intended to be taken literally, or maybe they were and have yet to transform our understanding of the art of Renaissance embellishment.
D. James Ross