Consort Music
Philomusica of London
Jacobean Ensemble
Boyd Neel String Orchestra/Thurston Dart
rec. 1956/57, London. ADD
ELOQUENCE 482 8574 [2 CDs: 144.07]
The two CDs which comprise Consort Music contain nearly two and a half hours (more than 50 pieces) of late Mediaeval and Renaissance (16th, 17th Centuries) music originally released in the late 1950s (on L’Oiseau-Lyre OL 50127, 50133, 50163) by a handful of the few musicians who were beginning to explore ‘early’ music at that time. So, there are few or no original instruments to be heard on the CDs and very little of what is now recognised as ‘historically informed’ performance practice. Additionally, there are almost no concessions to what we have come to accept as styles, which respect the idioms and ‘genuine’ flavour of the music from the reigns of Elizabeth I and James VI/I. But, as a record of how such small-scale music was performed 60 years ago, this is an ample and representative collection. Approach it in the right spirit and you’ll not be disappointed.
Given simultaneous developments in Europe in the post war years, the playing here is hardly ‘state of the art’. But throughout the accounts are inspired, have energy, sensitivity (listen to the Amantis Pavan from the Lachrymae [CD.1 tr.12]… gentle, hushed, almost cautions) and a sense of respect for the music. There is no attempt either to mould it to contemporary ensemble sounds, or to impose a crude approximation or mirror of what the musicians of the 1950s thought such music ought to have sounded like. By the same token the Lachrymae’s Upton’s Funerall [CD.1 tr.18] is almost fragile with its tenderness and refusal to penetrate Dowland’s mourning with anything other than tears.
The very first piece – lush, richly harmonised and gently romantic arrangements of Dowland’s Lachrimae (of 1604) – for instance, sounds more like Holst or Respighi with its fewer than half a dozen strings (viols, or violins) than the original reduced and sharpened score for lute.
Look next at the short (12-page) booklet that comes with the CDs. It contains informative and generally helpful (historical) background to the consort music from the Jacobean period and to the use Shakespeare made of dance music. Adapted from the original sleeve notes for those LPs and written by pioneer Thurston Dart (1921-1971 – hard to believe he would have been 100 next year), the commentary, detailed and balanced, rightly celebrates the contribution to the world of music made by the more than a dozen British-born or settled composers from the turn of the seventeenth century represented here.
There is an equally noticeable attempt by the musicians of all three groups here to arrange the original court music for instrumental combinations: The interweaving lute in the same Lachrymal’s Captaine Digory Piper’s Galiard [CD.1 tr.15] bespeaks subtlety and delicacy in sure contrast to the richness of the orchestral textures generally.
Writers like Bruce Haynes have (since) argued persuasively that each generation’s conception of ‘early’ music is equally legitimate – essentially because each new cohort of musicians is (or ought to be) arriving at their ‘best guess’ of how contemporary performances may have sounded. There is, to put it another way, no definitive ‘end point’, for which we should all be waiting, or towards which we should all be heading.
So it is that these rich strings and organ should be accepted as honest attempts to produce a rendition which conveys what one musician (of a 20th Century disposition) receives from another (from several centuries earlier). If that is accepted, then these two CDs can be enjoyed and appreciated as happy samples of early Renaissance consort music regardless of how accurate – or not – they may be claimed to be.
What isn’t to be found, though, is any measure of real contrast between one piece – and thus one composer – and another. Yes, an organ is added, strings thickened/doubled, and harpsichord introduced from time to time but there is a certain homogeneity in texture. This, it has to be acknowledged, reflects the perspective of the 1950s on music so apparently disconnected from those years.
At first blush the pieces may come across as somewhat ‘jaunty’ and ‘delightful’. Listen more closely to hear how the musicians have, in fact, honoured the composers whose music they are effectively unearthing after almost four centuries. The same turns of phrase as could be heard in the music of Walton, Jacobs, Warlock (Philip Heseltine). There too were those telling delays of impact, of climax; the same pregnant innuendos; the same confident senses of direction, the same assuredness in melodic development. Important also the same desire to lead to a resolution (Coprario’s Fantasy movement in the ‘Suite for violin, bass viol and chamber organ’ [CD.2 tr.1], for example, pulses with determination to reach a conclusion).
That sample – with its spread from Dowland, Ward and Philips to Hume – is a good one. There are composers here of whom we hear less nowadays like Lupo, Farrant and Brade. And some – such as Byrd, Weelkes and Morley – who are missing. Take the CDs as a whole, understand the historical context, and your only reservation might be that the presentation of the CDs did little to set expectations of that context.
The acoustic (no details are given; only ‘London, UK’) is clean although almost inevitably the recording techniques on these ADD LPs render the overall soundscape a little indistinct. Certainly less transparent and precise than we expect when performances – pretty much since the advent of the CD a quarter of a century later – prize clarity and close attention to each instrument’s unedited sound. But that’s really the point of this release – although, as said – nowhere does Eloquence really present these recordings as anything other than prima facie renderings of the music. It was the research and belief in its validity by the highly accomplished Thurston Dart, in particular, and the Philomusica of London, Jacobean Ensemble then Boyd Neel String Orchestra (in that order, really) which first pushed British music before Purcell onto our horizons.
We should thank them for doing so and enjoy these two CDs for what they are: Historical documents. They are the maps, not the territories, of what we now know to be splendid flowerings of ensembles widely enjoyed (it’s been estimated that one in three Londoners attended Shakespeare’s theatre) four hundred years ago. Those curious about the revival, who don’t already have recordings of Dowland, Coprario, Gibbons, Holborne and their coevals, will find the performances here instructive. But look elsewhere for the ‘real thing’.
Mark Sealey
Contents
CD 1
John DOWLAND (1562-1626)
Lachrimae, 1604 [58:12]
John COPRARIO (1575-1626)
Suite for violin, bass viol and chamber organ [6:25]
Suite for two violins, bass viol and chamber organ [3:50]
Anonymous C16th
Miserere (Parthenia In-Violata) [1:44]
John WARD (1571-1638)
Ayre [1:50]
Thomas LUPO
Fantasia [3:21]
CD 2
John COPRARIO (1575-1626)
Fantasia for violin, bass viol and continuo [3:30]
Suite for violin, bass viol and chamber organ [7:54].
Tobias HUME (?1579-1645
Captaine Humes Galliard (The First Part of Ayres no.50) [3:19]
Captain Hume's Lamentation [6:41]
Orlando GIBBONS (1583-1625)
Galliard [1:54]
John DOWLAND (1562-1626)
Pavan [4:48]
Thomas SIMPSON (1582-1628)
Alman [1:18]
Ricercar [3:20]
Peter PHILIPS (1561-1628)
Passamezzo Pavan [4:54]
Anthony HOLBORNE (1545-1602)
Galliard [1:17]
Coranto 'Heigh ho holiday' [1:00]
Pavan 'The Funerals' [3:56]
Alman 'The Honie-suckle' [1:38]
Richard FARRANT (1530-1580)
Four-Note Pavan [5:28]
Robert JOHNSON (1580-1634)
The Temporiser [3:29]
The Witty Wanton [2:53]
John ADSON (c.1587-1640)
Ayre [1:44]
Alfonso FERRABOSCO (1575-1628)
Four Note Pavan [4:43]
William BRADE (1560-1630)
Alman [0:57]
Coranto [1:52]
Galliard [1:32]
