Dieterich BUXTEHUDE (?1637–1707)
Jubilate Domino, BuxWV 64 [9:26]
Fugue in C major, BuxWV 174 [3:50]
In dulci jubilo, BuxWV 52 [8:37]
Francesco Canova Da MILANO (1497–1543)
Lute Fantasias Nos. 30 and 40 ed. A.J. Ness [4:31]
Lute Fantasia (unnumbered) [2:49]
Thomas CAMPION (1567–1620)
Never Weather-beaten Sail [3:16]
Most Sweet and Pleasing are Thy ways, O God [3:13]
Author of Light [3:28]
To music bent [3:09]
ANONYMOUS (attrib. CAMPION)
Miserere my Maker (c. 1615) [5:30]
Henry PURCELL (1659–1695)
Come, Ye Sons of Art, Z. 323 [23:43]
Alfred Deller (countertenor)
Margaret Ritchie, Eileen McLoughlin (soprano), John Whitworth (countertenor), Bruce Boyce, (baritone), Maurice Bevan (bass-baritone)
Eli Goren, Leonard Friedman (violins), Anna Shuttleworth (cello)
Desmond Dupré (viola da gamba, lute)
Denis Vaughan (organ)
St. Anthony Singers
Ensemble Orchestral de L’Oiseau-Lyre/Anthony Lewis (Purcell)
rec. 1953 (Purcell), 1955 (Buxtehude, Milano, Campion)
No texts
ELOQUENCE 484 0518 [72:21]
Both L’Oiseau-Lyre LPs disinterred here feature Alfred Deller. ‘The Music of Buxtehude and Lutenist Songs’ and the Purcell (and Lully) albums were released in the mid-1950s and there were still some years to go before he switched to Vanguard and to other labels. He is accompanied by distinguished contemporaries, both vocal and instrumental, and cedes ground to Desmond Dupré in the lute songs disc, for solo lute pieces.
Denis Vaughan’s name is missing from the personnel listing in the booklet for Buxtehude’s Jubilate Domino but it’s rightly present in the companion In dulci jubilo. The excellent string players were reared on more romanticised tenets but try to bridge the gap with Dupré’s viola da gamba playing and to a degree they do so. Deller, meanwhile, sings splendidly and for some heretical moments I felt his singing superior to his singing of Purcell. Be careful with the volume control in the Fugue in C major for organ – not the most subtly recorded item here - as this jolly 4-minute piece might otherwise jeopardize your building’s structural integrity. Dupré plays three lute fantasias by Francesco Canova da Milano, Nos. 30 and 40 singly tracked but the unnumbered one has its own tracking. Eloquence notes that this last fantasia has never before been released.
There are four Campion lute songs and one attributed to him. It’s a superior selection of songs that brings the very best from the countertenor and his lute accompanist and of them it’s perhaps Never Weather-beaten sail that is the most beautifully sung and the most affectingly intimate.
The final work is Purcell’s Come, Ye Sons of Art. His fellow singers are Margaret Richie, John Whitworth, and Bruce Boyce, with the ensemble and chorus directed by Anthony Lewis, the conductor who did so much to spread the Baroque word at this time. Lewis’s reading of the opening Sinfonia is typically noble, stoic and un-double dotted, full of late-Romantic touches emphasized by the breadth and expressivity of the strings’ vibratos. For all its virtues though, this version can’t compete with Deller’s Vanguard remake in 1962 when he, his son Mark, Mary Thomas, Maurice Bevan and the Oriana Consort Choir and orchestra comprehensively trump this earlier affair. For one thing the chorus is too distant and woolly, Deller’s phrase tapering in his opening solo is too emphatic, Sound the trumpet is a bit pretty-pretty and Margaret Ritchie, a fine singer who had recorded Purcell on Decca 78s during the War, sounds a touch stentorian.
No texts but there are pleasing notes and the restorations are faithful, having done what they can with the source material.
Jonathan Woolf
