Ground Floor / Alice Julien-Laferrière IL GENIO INGLESE

 IL GENIO INGLESE

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.”

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)