Early English Instrumental Music

Started by Mandryka, October 27, 2015, 01:42:21 AM

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Mandryka



A rather good Lawes CD from Anthony Rooley here, warmly recorded, sober, Lawes is for me a very challenging composer but The Consort of Musicke have found the right groove IMO
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milk

Quote from: Mandryka on July 23, 2018, 02:25:38 AM
Have you heard this?



Richard Egarr recorded some Gibbons for the same label as his Louis Couperin. I have a rather good transfer of the Hogwood, better than the commercial transfer though with a bit of LP noise - I can always let you have it if you want. I like Daniel-Ben Pienaar's performances very much. Gibbons's instrumental music is I think, hard to get off the page.
I had missed your post. I did acquire the Hogwood. Thanks for the offer. It's very is enjoyable.

Mandryka

#162
         

Quote from: Gio here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Locke-Consort-Fower-Parts-Fretwork/dp/B000005GGT/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544802286&sr=8-1&keywords=fretwork+locke. . . but the general mood of the music is more philosophical than lusty.

This comment is from a customer review for the Fretwork CD on amazon. And he's right, and it pinpoints one essential difference between between their conception of Locke, or maybe of all Italianate late baroque music, and that of Phantasm. Which is more stylish I cannot say. But I can say that I find the suppleness and smoothness of Fretwork's approach rather beguiling. Phantasm, with a more sharp edged articulation and a less sweet, harder tone, are more demanding and less relaxing certainly. Does that make them more modern?

Also, it may or may not be relevant to point out that  Markku Luolajan-Mikkola, now on this latest Locke CD with Phantasm, recorded Jenkins and possibly other things with Fretwork. As far as I know, the leak is one way: Phantasm has lost no personnel to Fretwork.

This is, in fact, Phantasm's second Locke recording, as if proof were needed of their commitment to making sense of the composer's music.  Can someone let me have the first so I can hear the evolution?



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Mandryka

#163
Quote from: Mandryka on March 08, 2017, 07:58:37 AM


Bernard Klapprott plays Thomas Tomkins variations on Fortune my Foe. This was Tomkins final work, and a magnum opus, yet there are only two recordings I think - this and Carol Cerasi.

I didn't get much joy from either Cerasi or  Klapprott, but here's a promising one by the imaginative Gerard van Reenen, whose Pachelbel was more than interesting


https://www.youtube.com/v/upbI2HUoigQ

He writes


QuoteByrd, Gibbons, Morley, Bull, Farnaby and others . . .  wrote their pieces for the virginals, but we may interpret this as for all keyboard instruments (virginal, harpsichord, organ, regals, clavichord). The harmonium did not exist during that time, but I dare to play this piece on that instrument. I play with an "old" interpretation and I have tuned my harmonium in mean-tone temperament.
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Mandryka

And here's the same performer on a harpsichord with Barafostus's Dream, which has probably fared rather better on record than the above variations because of Leonhardt's recording.

https://www.youtube.com/v/dDTD9s0OiQo
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Mandryka

#165
Quote from: Mandryka on December 14, 2018, 07:29:04 AM

This is, in fact, Phantasm's second Locke recording, as if proof were needed of their commitment to making sense of the composer's music.



This is played less for thrill, less vigorously, more peacefully and lyrically than their later recording, to me they feel very much at ease with themselves and the music, relaxed about playing it. I haven't checked but maybe the line up was different, maturer, in the first recording.  The sound of the ensemble is more sinewy in the later recording, the harmonies more interestingly crunchy, which suites their wired interpretation.
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Mandryka

#166


The first thing to say is that the harpsichord sounds beautiful and is well recorded. Timothy Roberts knows how to play it - he can make lots of different colours and attacks. His style is sobre, authoritative and classical, I mean that there's a sense of control, confidence and poise - like the control, confidence and poise of the archetypical English gentleman in fact, Steady Steed. Tempo is well judged and natural.  You could, I think, say that Roberts is didactic almost - as if he's demonstrating to his listeners how the music unfolds, showing us the music's structure. But the quality of his playing, his good judgement and indeed the quality of the music stopped me from reproaching him his bloodlessness, stopped me from imagining that the music was being telephoned in from afar, and stopped me from ever thinking I was back at school.

Timothy Roberts is the same sort of ilk as Richard Lester.
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Que

Quote from: Mandryka on February 18, 2019, 09:47:22 PM


The first thing to say is that the harpsichord sounds beautiful and is well recorded. Timothy Roberts knows how to play it - he can make lots of different colours and attacks. His style is sobre, authoritative and classical, I mean that there's a sense of control, confidence and poise - like the control, confidence and poise of the archetypical English gentleman in fact, Steady Steed. Tempo is well judged and natural.  You could, I think, say that Roberts is didactic almost - as if he's demonstrating to his listeners how the music unfolds, showing us the music's structure. But the quality of his playing, his good judgement and indeed the quality of the music stopped me from reproaching him his bloodlessness, stopped me from imagining that the music was being telephoned in from afar, and stopped me from ever thinking I was back at school.

Timothy Roberts is the same sort of ilk as Richard Lester.

I'm very fond of that recording - one of my favourites in English harpsichord.

Q

JCBuckley

Quote from: Que on February 18, 2019, 10:00:09 PM
I'm very fond of that recording - one of my favourites in English harpsichord.

Q

+ 1

Mandryka

#169


A  contrasting view of Farnaby here. Hantai gives it colour, swagger and bite. I think this was the first thing that Hantai recorded, and IMO is possibly THE most important harpsichord release of the past 50 years, heralding the free, fluid and virtuosic style which Hantai and Glen Wilson subsequently explored in other music.
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Mandryka

#170


The organ at Saint-Thomas de Cantorbéry in Mont Saint Aignan is 17th century originally, reconstructed back to how it was then, meantone,  details here

http://www.lesmeslanges.org/documents/orgue.pdf

I knew Thilo Muster before through a Guilan CD, this Bull recording was released last year. Very incisive playing, attractive and imaginative registrations I'd say, sometimes the pulse is unyielding, maybe hard to avoid in this music, and anyway what he does full of life and even ecstatic / hypnotic at times, in some of the big pieces, fantasias and in nomines, he's very good at making the transitions flow naturally.

Here's the organist's website

http://thilomuster.info/bio-2/

Fabulous sound.

This is worth hearing I think.
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Que

Quote from: Mandryka on February 27, 2019, 01:29:45 PM


The organ at Saint-Thomas de Cantorbéry in Mont Saint Aignan is 17th century originally, reconstructed back to how it was then, meantone,  details here

http://www.lesmeslanges.org/documents/orgue.pdf

I knew Thilo Muster before through a Guilan CD, this Bull recording was released last year. Very incisive playing, attractive and imaginative registrations I'd say, sometimes the pulse is unyielding, maybe hard to avoid in this music, and anyway what he does full of life and even ecstatic / hypnotic at times, in some of the big pieces, fantasias and in nomines, he's very good at making the transitions flow naturally.

Here's the organist's website

http://thilomuster.info/bio-2/

Fabulous sound.

This is worth hearing I think.

I'm more generous in my judgement: a superb performance and, considering the special organ, a unique recording!  :)

Not that really matters...but the recording was (originally) issued in 2012 - I got my copy over three years ago.

Q

Mandryka

#172
Thanks Q, I only found out about it last week and saw 2018, that must have referred to it's transfer to a stream.

 

Two harpsichord only CDs pretty well devoted to fantasias by Byrd and  Farnaby. Fantasia here denotes a genre in which simple variation and imitation of a motif gradually accelerates, and in the end, the density and rapidity of notes is so intense that the formal rails are transcended, like an aeroplane taking flight, slowly on the runway and then faster and faster . . . .

A whole CD of this sort of music may sound a bit academic and off putting, but it has the potential to be like an Art of the Fugue avant la lettre. 

Wilson has an impressive bravura technique, something which here may well be a sine qua non. He can show imagination in the way he embelishes the music with rubato and with ornaments. He has a wonderful Hantaï like capacity for making packets of notes leap out, like discharges of static electricity from a Van Der Graaf generator. Moreover he doesn't shrink from underlining asperities and dissonances. He never loses the thread in what is very complex music.

Wilson has a tendency to pound, as if he's got his boots on the keyboard. For both Byrd and for Farnaby, he chose to use a copy of a Ruckers harpsichord, with the typical rich tones of a Dutch instrument. I wonder if this sense of heavy handedness is a consequence of his choice of instrument - he may have been better off with a virginal, an Italian harpsichord or an organ.

The sound is fine, particularly in the Byrd.

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Mandryka



An astonishing organ rendition of Bull's Ut re mi fa sol la (God save the king) here, somehow Rampe makes it sound like a Shostakovich scherzo, with a repeating motif like a battering ram. He takes it fast on an organ.
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Mandryka

#174


William Cranford. (fl. 1613-1621) was long dead when Henry Purcell was born (Purcell:1659– 1695) Nevertheless his sequence of viol fantasias are every bit as contrapuntally and textually interesting as Purcell's -- I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Purcell was paying homage to him when he wrote them.

The notes in the recording by Le Strange Viols say that

QuotePerhaps because Cranford's musical style
is so idiomatic to a particularly insular vein of
Stuart consort music, it has not yet found the
popularity among modern listeners enjoyed by
the brash and flamboyant William Lawes or the
incredibly prolific and cultivated John Jenkins.
Gordon Dodd's characterization of Cranford's
music as "pointilliste" and "mechanical" has
managed to cast a shadow, perhaps, across
Cranford's evident enjoyment of unique textures
and droll sequences of close imitation. Cranford's
fantasias reveal an astonishing breadth of internal
contrasts and subtle use of an often strikingly
modern-sounding harmonic palette, such as his
conspicuous use of modal mixture in the opening
of the fourth fantasia a4. His consort music is also
quite technically demanding, requiring frequent
forays above the frets in the treble parts and the
nimble execution of tricky divisions in the close
quarters of dense ensemble textures

For my part I much prefer his consort music to the so called "brash and flamboyant William Lawes" (I wish Lawes were a bit more brash and flamboyant in fact.) The booklet essay by Lauren Ludwig is spot on I'd say when she comments on

Quote. . .  Cranford's evident enjoyment of unique textures
and droll sequences of close imitation. Cranford's
fantasias reveal an astonishing breadth of internal contrasts and subtle use of an often strikingly
modern-sounding harmonic palette. . .

as was a gentleman of the C 17, Dudley North, who praised Cranford's music for its

Quotegravity,
majesty, honey-dew spirit, and variety


The Le Strange consort, New York musicians, are well able to play the music and they have a good set of instruments. For me this recording is a major discovery -- in fact I may end up preferring the sequence to Purcell's!
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Mandryka

#175


Jamie Johnstone plays Gibbons. One thing which caught my attention about this is that he uses a harpsichord for some pieces and a virginal for others. There's much more relief in his harpsichord pieces, with the voices intersecting, the virginal pieces make a more flat texture.
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Mandryka

#176


Bernard Klapprott has recently become a much more familiar name to people who are interested in C17 keyboard music because he released an Art of Fugue with Bob van Asperen, where he is present in 4 of the 19 pieces. He's here  in much earlier music, the first volume of his complete survey of keyboard music by Thomas Tomkins.

In fact, mentioning Art of Fugue may not be incidental, because Klapprott's vision makes the contrapuntal nature of Tomkins's music really central -- that more than lyricism or colour. We have hear a Tomkins whose music is, in some sense, in the same genre as Bach's counterpoint.

Whereas Asperen and Klapprott chose to systematically embellish their Bach with trills, Klopprott systematically embellishes his Tomkins with agogic hesitations. They aren't intrusive, on the contrary they are a subtle, organic and effective way of creating a pulse -- as a strategy I think it's much more satisfactory than the ornaments in their Bach.

Klapprott was a pupil of Asperen's and you can I think tell, because there's a similar sense of fantasy in polyphony. This comes out very well in the famous Barafostus.

There's a sense here of an uncompromising investigation of the music, without any sense of superficiality. He uses on this volume a harpsichord and a virginal both tuned in some sort of meantone way. Well recorded. A great joy to rediscover, a rediscovery which has made me value Tomkins much more than I had done before. What a shame there is such a paucity of his music on record.



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Mandryka

#177


This recording of Purcell sonatas has caught my imagination more than any other I've heard - luminous sound and full of emotional contrasts. Normally I've dismissed Purcell sonatas as a bit trivial but these performances show that they can be made interesting to hear.

By the way I came across Les Nièces de Rameau because I stumbled across this unexpected  recording of transcriptions of English music made by Les Inattendus, and one of the Les Nièces de Rameau's members is Marianne Müller, a pupil of Wieland Kuijken

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Mandryka

#178


It's very good to have all these five part fantasias collected together like this, Spirit of Gambo are clearly committed to Jenkins like no other consort. It has only just been released and so I've just begun to listen. But my initial reaction is slightly mitigated by a nagging doubt - that their interpretations are too fluid and too lyrical. In short, that the performances are under-articulated. The result may sometimes come close to the thing which must be avoided in polyphonic music like this at all costs - an interwoven hotchpotch.

This seems rather different from what they did on their recording of four part fantasias, and of course the sound is different too, thicker in the five part music of course, but also I'd say less strongly underpinned by the bass viol. This could be partly due to the engineering - there seems to me to be more air between the musicians in the four part recording



Of course the music is different. Four the five part music we read

QuoteIn view of the range of expression and colour in these fantasias, it is extraor- dinary that only three tonics (G, D and C) are used.

while for the four part music we read

QuoteWhat is most striking about these fantasias is the succession of keys, not only from one piece to another, but within individual pieces. Unlike in earlier centuries, distant tonalities are not considered as foreign regions, but as territories that one may cross before returning safely home.

a comment which is followed up by a tantalising (for me) remark on enharmonics

QuoteEnharmonic modulations – frequent in the music of the romantic period – give his music a timeless aspect. There appears to be little change going on, and yet the harmony is altering radically. In the harmonic complexity of his writing, Jenkins to a large extent prepared the way for his successor Henry Purcell.

Anyway it's probably not right to post these very preliminary reactions because I'm almost bound to change my mind. But I thought I'd state them in case anyone else felt like listening to see if they feel the same way  p
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Mandryka

#179


This disc is triply valuable. First it is as far as I know the only commercial recording with substantial amounts of music played at Uttum. Second it is the only organ recording as far as I know with substantial amounts of music by Thomas Tomkins. Third it benefits from Bernard Klapprott's seriousness and penchant for contrapuntal music.

Klapprott has chosen the pieces carefully, the criterion I most appreciate is that the music here seems to have a singing quality, something which befits the Uttum organ very well. The tangy harmonies of some of the pieces, for example the In Nomine 8 and the piece No.68 (without title), is no doubt partly due to the way the Uttum instrument is tuned.

Klapprott's tendency for sobriety does not prevent him from finding nobility and indeed extroversion when he feels fit, for example in the wonderful Clarifica Me.

One piece I find particularly moving is the "Short verse for Edward Thornburgh."  Thornburgh was executed for his religious beliefs and Tomkins created a musical memorial for him in the form of a pavan. Klapprott follows this with a pair of  pieces  on a related theme, which make for an effective coda. The three are followed by the well known offertory, and that programming seems to work really well to me.

The booklet essay is exemplary, with scholarly and accessible discussions of the music, the Uttum organ and the nature of the English organ in Tomkins's time.

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