Cantus Thuringia TIME STANDS STILL

Hope? Time and again it is hidden at best. Consolation? A little, but it is subliminal at most. Sadness, grief, melancholy? These are present in abundance. Anyone who sets out to discover English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will time and again stumble upon constants that left their mark on this music over an astonishingly lengthy period of time. The characteristics of melancholy may be found not only in the secular music of a Renaissance composer like John Dowland but also – several decades later – in the sacred music of two Baroque composers, Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell.

These two epochs share common features and complement one another amazingly well – “even though Dowland and Purcell each developed and cultivated a distinctive personal style, making it generally easy to recognize their authorship very quickly,” declares Christoph Dittmar, who functions as primus inter pares – the first among equals – in this new album from Cantus Thuringia. This congruity is all the more remarkable in that 132 years separate the year of Dowland’s birth from that of Purcell’s death. “By way of comparison take the elderly Telemann and the young Mozart – their lives overlapped, and yet their music is worlds apart.” It may be possible to explain this by reference to the English vocal and, more especially, choral tradition that evolved over a period of several centuries and that continued to leave its mark on composers such as Benjamin Britten.

According to Christoph Dittmar, what particularly attracted Cantus Thuringia to this programme was “the intimacy of the reduced resources, especially when compared to our previous recordings, which were devoted to a German repertory scored for relatively large forces. An additional factor was the interest shown by the recorder player Silvia Müller, who wanted to work with a vocal ensemble in her search for new challenges. “And so we chose pieces in which the recorder plays diminutions – embellishments – sometimes as the upper voice, sometimes as the middle voice. The recorder was extremely popular in England at this time and remained so until the eighteenth century, with entire recorder consorts being permanently engaged at certain courts.”

Seldom Sene / Klaartje van Veldhoven DELIGHT IN MUSICKE

Recorder quintet SELDOM SENE, founded in Amsterdam in 2009, is a group of five musicians with a mutual passion for consort playing. With a combined interest in the interpretation and performance of both early and contemporary music, these highly skilled and dynamic players each bring a wealth of expertise, creativity, passion and virtuosity to the ensemble. With inventive programmes that juxtapose early and contemporary music, Seldom Sene excels at all aspects of ensemble playing, performing with "power, precision and profound expression" (Gustavo Beytelmann, Illzach 2011).

The musicians originate from Germany, England, Spain and Holland and met whilst studying at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. They perform on a collection of over 50 different recorders, including a variety of baroque and modern instruments and also own renaissance consorts with recorders made by Bob Marvin, Francesco Li Virghi, Monika Musch and Ture Bergstrøm.

Whilst searching for more unfamiliar repertoire, one of the first pieces to catch their attention was Seldom sene by the English composer Christopher Tye – a short work full of beauty, precision and striking rhythmic complexity that they felt captured the essence of their vision: performing unique and compelling repertoire at a standard that is seldom seen and heard. Since their foundation, "Seldom Sene excels because of their excellent musical interpretation and beautiful choice of repertoire" (Frédéric de Roos, Le Mans 2009).

n October 2009 the group made their debut at the "Concours International d’Ensembles de Flûte á bec" organised by the "Société des Amis de Arnold Dolmetsch" in Le Mans where they were awarded 1st Prize. In 2011 they received the Interpretation Prize (by unanimous vote of the five jury members) at the 17th International Chamber Music Competition in Illzach (France). In September 2014 they were awarded the First Prize, the Audience Award and the Press Prize of the International Van Wassenaer Early Music Competition, which took place during the Utrecht Early Music Festival.

Seldom Sene has given many recitals in renowned series​They record for the Dutch label Brilliant Classics, which released CDs Taracea (2014), El aire se serena (2016) and J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations (2017), selected as Bach Album of the Year 2017 by the listeners of the Dutch radio station Concertzender. Their fourth record, Delight in Musicke is a selection of songs and instrumental music from the English Renaissance featuring soprano Klaartje van Veldhoven.

Ruby Hughes / Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann / Jonas Nordberg HEROINES OF LOVE AND LOSS

The women appearing before our ears throughout this programme range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare’s Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines – the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 – 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on the suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world – Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes ‘the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant’, to quote Monteverdi’s brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann – who also contribute instrumental solos – she here revels in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by the combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.