MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


CD REVIEW

Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger

alternatively
CD: AmazonUK
Download: Classicsonline

 

Airs and Graces
Francesco BARSANTI (1690-1772)
Lord Aboynes Welcome, or Cumbernault House (1742) [2:12]2
Waly Waly (1742) [1:26]2
Clout the Cauldron (1742) [1:52]2
John STANLEY (1712-1786)
Solo IV in B Minor, from Op.4, for flute and basso continuo (1745) [7:16]1
Francesco BARSANTI (1690-1772)
Lochaber (1742) [3:13]2
Robert BREMNER (c.1720-1789)
Fy Gar Rub Her O’er With Straw (1765) [3:57]
Francesco BARSANTI (1690-1772)
Busk Ye Busk Busk Ye Bonny Bride (1742) [4:57]2
George Friedrich HANDEL (1685-1759)
Sonata in B Minor for flute and basso continuo, HWV 376 (1730) [6:35]1
Francesco GEMINIANI (1687-1762)
Sonata in C major  for cello and basso continuo, Op.5 No 3 (1746) [12:15]1,2
Robert BREMNER (c.1720-1789)
The Flowers of the Forrest (1765) [1:59]
Francesco BARSANTI (1690-1772)
Dumbarton’s Drums (1742) [1:13]1
Logan Water (1742) [2:05]2
Johan Helmich ROMAN (1694-1758)
Sonata X in E Minor for flute and basso continuo, BeRl 210 (1727) [11:35]1
George Friedrich HANDEL (1685-1759)
Minuetto, from Sonata in E Minor, HWV 375 (1730) [3:22]1
Parnassus Avenue: Dan Laurin (recorder), David Tayler (archlute, theorbo, baroque guitar), Hanneke van Proosdij (harpsichord, recorder), Tanya Tomkins (cello)1, William Skeen (cello)2
rec. June 2005, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Belvedere, California
BIS BISSACD1595 [65:47]

 

Experience Classicsonline


Graced by a cover image taken from Hogarth’s The Enraged Musician, this is a lively and pleasant collection of music by both native British composers and foreign visitors and reisidents, music written in the middle years of the Eighteenth Century. Hogarth’s etching, it may be remembered, shows a violinist frustrated in his attempts to rehearse by the noise created beneath his window by, amongst others, a ballad singer (carrying a crying child) singing ‘The Ladies Fall’, an impoverished looking man playing a hautboy and a small boy playing the drum. Hogarth’s ‘classical’ musician wants – and fails – to exclude the popular music of the street. For the most part, this programme played by American chamber group Parnassus Avenue is made up of music which, on the contrary, embraces the popular.

Running as a continuous thread through the disc are pieces from A Collection of Old Scots Tunes, the work of Francesco Barsanti, published in 1742. Born in Lucca in 1790, Barsanti came to London in 1714, and was largely based there, though making several returns to Lucca, until the mid 1730s, making his living as a flautist and oboist. By 1735 he was in Edinburgh, where he married and grew familiar with traditional Scottish songs and tunes. His interest in this music and his preparation of his own versions of some of it, can be seen as part of that same renewed interest in the Celtic world which was one of the early signs of romanticism and which gave us such fashionable works as Macpherson’s fraudulent Poems of Ossian or Gray’s marvellous poem ‘The Bard’ and, musically, was later to include, inter alia, Haydn’s and Beethoven’s settings of Scottish and Welsh songs. Barsanti’s chamber arrangements of tunes such as ‘Waly, waly’, ‘Clout the Cauldron’ and ‘Dumbarton’s Drums’ have charm, and played sympathetically by Parnassus Avenue, notably by the featured recorder of Dan Laurin, these are attractive pieces of ‘domesticated’ folk music. Barsanti would doubtless have made himself familiar with Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany of 1724 (important for both the music and the poetic texts it assembles) –and Barsanti’s music has more than a little of the tea-table about it too. A native Scotsman who also made arrangements of traditional tunes was the interesting figure of Robert Bremner, very important in his day but largely forgotten now. Since the booklet notes offer no information on him it may be worth providing a little here, to put his work in context. Bremner opened a music business in Edinburgh in 1754 and was soon supplying music to the important Edinburgh Musical Society. In 1756 he published his Rudiments of Music and played a significant role in the reforming of the music used in the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He worked as an agent for the Edinburgh Musical Society, recommending performers, from London and elsewhere, to the Society. He published a wide range of music and, at one point, purchased what we now know as the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Amongst collections of his own music to be published was his Harpsichord or Spinnet Miscellany of 1765, from which both ‘Fy Gar Rub Her O’er With Straw’ and ‘The Flowers of the Forrest’ are taken. They get engaging, lively, idiomatic performances from Hanneke van Proosdij. It would be good to hear more of Bremner’s music.

There are more familiar names and music here too. Handel (at least as a name) is represented by the lovely Sonata in B minor (HWV 376) and by a minuetto from another sonata (HWV 375). Both were published by John Walsh in a collection of 1730, a collection in which Handel’s name looms large though Walsh is ambiguous as to the exact authorship of the music. Whether or not these pieces are by Handel is a matter of debate; what is more certain is that they are rather fine pieces. So, too, is the work by which John Stanley is represented, eloquently and elegantly played by Parnassus Avenue. Another Lucca born composer – Francesco Geminiani – is represented too. An interesting connection here is that in 1777 Robert Bremner republished Geminiani’s 1751 treatise The Art of Playing the Violin. Geminiani’s Sonata for cello heard here is from his Opus 5 set, published in 1746, a collection of some real importance in the baroque cello repertoire. Tanya Tomkins is the pleasing soloist here (with William Skeen’s cello playing its role in the continuo accompaniment). The Swedish composer John Helmich Roman was in London between 1715 and 1721, mixing with both Geminiani and Handel. The sonata recorded here – first published in Stockholm in 1727, the year in which Roman was appointed Director of the Drottningholm court orchestra – has some distinctly Handelian touches about it.

All in all, this disc attracts and satisfies both by the generally high standard of performance (and recorded sound) and by the enterprising choice of repertoire.

Glyn Pursglove




 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.