Pamela Thorby / Andrew Lawrence-King GARDEN OF EARLY DELIGHTS

The title’s a play on both Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Jacob van Eyck’s recorder collection The Flute’s Garden of Delights; but more than anything this new disc recalls Herbert’s line “a box where sweets compacted lie”. Straddling the Renaissance and early Baroque, the programme comprises sonatas, sets of divisions and arrangements of songs and popular tunes from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and England. This repertoire proves rich soil for Thorby and Lawrence-King, and the resulting cross-fertilisation of styles and modes of expression with a modern scholarly aesthetic enlivened by two of the keenest musical intelligences in the business results in a most satisfying listening experience. 

Thorby maximises the affective impact of the music through an incredibly varied approach to articulation and phrasing - compare the lively glosses of the delightful opening track, Diego Ortiz’s Recercada segunda de tenore, with the evocative, floating lines of Giovanni Battista Fontana’s Sonata seconda. Lawrence-King is likewise alert to the rhetorical possibilities inherent in both his accompaniments and solos; in the former category, he proves an ideal partner for Thorby in his ability to think vocally, while in the latter his almost visual sense of line and colour is apparent, as in Biagio Marini’s Passacaglio and Dowland’s “Weep you no more”. 

Recorded sound is nothing short of stunning, while the cover image of a hummingbird nicely encapsulates Thorby’s lightness and agility as she darts from piece to piece to extract its nectar. This is Paradise indeed. (William Yeoman)

Hille Perl DOULCE MEMOIRE Glosas, Passeggiati & Diminutions around 1600

The art of improvisation was for much of musical history one of the most formidable weapons in the arsenal of performers. But in the 19th century it became largely lost (virtuoso pianists like Liszt and organists being notable exceptions) as the concept of the “sacrosanct score” gradually took root. In “art music”—to use a poor term to distinguish it from jazz—it is only with the revival of early music during the latter half of the last century that a reawakening of interest in improvisation has emerged, with performers as diverse as Robert Levin and Andrew Lawrence-King reviving long lost techniques and pushing back the boundaries of timidity.

No period lends itself more readily to such extemporary music-making than the late Renaissance or the early Baroque, a period during which countless treatises dedicated to providing examples for both vocal and instrumental embellishment appeared. For instrumental players, such improvisatory techniques specifically involved one of two kinds of process: either the use of one of the many bass patterns or ostinatos over which the player improvised a set of variations (or glosas), or the embellishment of a tune (frequently vocal in origin) by means of filling it with passage work or diminutions, as they were known. A couple of years back, I reviewed a Jordi Savall disc which took its point of departure from a collection of written-out variations (glosas) on ostinato basses, but also included some formidable examples of Savall’s own improvisatory prowess (Fanfare 25:4).
A key figure in Savall’s collection was the great Spanish composer and gambist Diego Ortiz (1525–c. 1570), whose hugely influential treatise Tratado de glosas appeared in 1553. Ortiz also looms large on this new disc with Hille Perl and what is largely Lawrence-King’s Harp Consort, but here the emphasis is different, the collection concentrating to near exclusivity on a variety of instrumental realizations of madrigals and chansons. One measure of the popularity of such vocal pieces was the number of times they appeared in transcription, or were accorded glosa treatment. It is therefore not surprising to find three different and widely varied versions of one of the most famous and beautiful of all chansons, Pierre Sandrin’s Doulce memoire. In one, Ortiz has ingeniously added a fifth part, while his glosa of it is extraordinarily sensitive, beautifully dovetailing the variants to maintain the dignified mien of the original. No such reserve is found in the version by Girolomo Dalla Casa, a cornettist at St. Mark’s, Venice from 1568, whose flamboyantly virtuosic jazzing up of the chanson elicits some appropriately dazzling playing from Perl. Equally fascinating is the comparison between the straight transcription for viols of Cipriano de Rore’s four-part madrigal Ben qui si mostra (1561) and the version with subtle vocal diminutions by the singer Angelo Notari. The establishment of basso continuo provided yet a further way of treating vocal pieces, as the arrangement of Willaert’s expressive chanson Jouissance vous donneray by Vincenzo Bonnizzi readily demonstrates. The only true improvisation is Lawrence-King’s rich extravaganza on Trabachi’s madrigal Ancidetemi pur (1603).
In sum, this beautifully performed disc provides a fascinating insight into the way instrumentalists established a repertoire of their own from vocal models. Judging from the cover illustration (an arty black and white photo of Perl posed in a cornfield) and the gambist’s new-age comments on the music (“This piece makes you want to leave just so you can return”), I suspect that some kind of crossover market is being aimed at. And why not? It’s all a darn sight more enjoyable than those abominable discs of opera stars singing Broadway songs. (Brian Robins)

Paul Hillier PROENSA

The title of this fascinating project from Paul Hillier refers to the southern French region of Provence, where the lyric poets of the troubadour tradition from which the album culls its music once flourished. Utilizing extant fragments of Provençal texts and melodies, Hillier and his musicians reconstruct a visceral program of songs.

If any single word could be applied to this album, it would be “haunting.” This is not to imply that it is a particularly “dark” album, but one that seems to occupy a space uninhabitable by the living. This music breathes at the very edges of our consciousness, which is perhaps why it is so vocally driven, for only through the frailty of the voice can its strengths be expressed. The language is similarly peripheral, with its shades of cognates and other etymological minutae. The arrangements get under the listener’s skin, evoking an atmosphere at once so antiquated as to be unrecoverable while also so modern that it could exist at no other time but the (recorded) present. The spirit of the music is easy to see, if difficult to place, for it is something felt on a physiological level, residing in our sense of collective history. The music unfolds in a way that is always aware of its origins, leaving us to question our own.