'Musick's Monument' - Crowe/Fretwork - Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell, 7 October 2021

Wigmore Hall

Byrd: Prelude and Ground a 5: ‘The Queen’s Goodnight’
O Lord, how vain
Fantasia a 5: ‘Two parts in one the fourth above’
O that most rare breast
Gibbons: Two Fantasias of 3 parts
Now each flowery bank of May
Byrd: My mistress had a little dog

Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
O solitude, my sweetest choice, Z406
Gibbons: Two In Nomines
Faire is the rose
Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
Oedipus, King of Thebes: ‘Music for a while’
The Fairy Queen: ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’

Lucy Crowe (soprano)
Fretwork (Richard Boothby, Asako Morikawa, Sam Stadlen, Emily Ashton, Joanna Levine)

Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument, or, A remembrance of the best practical musick, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world divided into three parts, looked back wistfully at an age of English music almost passed. Conservative, even reactionary, Mace detested new-fangled French influences on the musical culture of his own time. He disliked ‘Squaling-Scoulding-Fiddles’, to be used only if balanced by ‘Lusty Full-Sciz’d Theorbos’, and, as favoured sacred music from the age of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, elevated music for viol consort, consort songs included, over newer styles and genres. If most of Henry Purcell’s music stood very much in the latter vein, Purcell, in his celebrated Fantazias of 1780, also paid tribute to the golden age of the consort, showing beyond doubt that a composer could be master of both. It was a farewell, though, however masterly—and probably ignored. They went unpublished until 1927, by Peter Warlock, and there is no evidence of performance in Purcell’s lifetime. This concert from Fretwork and Lucy Crowe, then, also looked back at English music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, less from the standpoint of Mace than from that of Purcell. It proved enjoyable and instructive in equal measure. 

Byrd opened the programme and occupied much of the first half, shared with Gibbons, split between both halves, the younger composer a mediator between Byrd and Purcell. The Queen’s Goodnight, like so much of what was to come, flowed and gently danced: not reduced to merely ‘being’ a dance, but rather partaking its spirit, remembrance, and rejuvenation. The fascination of its harmonies spoke for itself without underlining, whether of false relations or other dissonances. This was a golden age of instrumental variations too, and it showed. Here was a lovely curtain-raiser, also enabling Byrd’s 1588 consort song tributes to Sir Philip Sidney, one to a text by Sidney himself, the other an explicit tribute by Sir Edward Dyer, to emerge as much as companion pieces as contrasts. Crowe’s floating of her melodic line atop the viol music proved undeniably affecting, perhaps especially in the Dyer setting, O that most rare breast. Undimmed in courtliness and affect, it negotiated and combined confessional traditions and boundaries as skilfully as Byrd himself, finally sublimated with quiet ecstasy on ‘thy friend here living dieth’. In between, for instruments only, Two parts in one the fourth above, gently suggested both affinity and variety within the family of consort music, much as one might with later instrumental music of Haydn. Pleasure derived both from occasional grit in the oyster, as well as the oyster itself, was the thing. Closing the first half, owing to a fine ballad-like performance by Crowe and her supporting musicians. 

Gibbons provided another voice, less expansive in the first of his two Fantasias than the second, and perhaps even another world in whose counterpoint one could readily, pleasurably lose oneself. In Fretwork’s performances, both of those Fantasias and two In nomines, it sounded lighter, perhaps more aristocratic, though not necessarily less ingenuous. If I find it less moving, on the whole, than Byrd or Purcell, that may just be me. Now each flowery bank of May had a different flavour, with a nice ambiguity in performance as to any ultimate message, should there be one: ‘… whose love is life, whose hate is death’. In the second half, Faire is the rose was short, sweet, and subtle. 

We lost a Duo in G for two bass viols by Christopher Simpson, Asako Morikawa having sprained her thumb—one would never have known from other performances—but heard four of Purcell’s four-part Fantazias. If there were times when I felt Purcell’s well-nigh Mozartian combination of seemingly effortless mastery and fathomless depth might have been served better by a touch of Romanticism, these were fluent, comprehending performances with their own agenda that had no need to be mine. At their best, they showed a splendid inevitability in unfolding and had me wanting more. Many counsel us against importing modern conceptions of sadness, melancholia, and so on into this music, but so much the worse for them. Purcell’s modernity remains as striking as his historicity; as with any great art, of which this is certainly an instance, the one encourages the other.

O solitude, my sweetest choice, as with all these songs realised by Richard Boothby for his own consort, likewise spoke with almost modern unity of words, music, and underlying sentiment in performance. At any rate, one could hear why Purcell’s word-setting continues to inspire Anglophone composers. Music certainly did our cares beguile ‘for a while’ in the celebrated, loveliest song from Oedipus, King of Thebes. ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’, from The Fairy Queen, spoke with readier humour, perhaps, than Byrd’s mistress and her dog. It was an animated, captivating performance, as was the surprise encore, as you are unlikely to have heard it before: Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’.

Esfahani - Tomkins, Gibbons, Scheidt, Bach, Jones, Kidane, Kalabis, and W.F. Bach, 27 April 2015

Milton Court

Tomkins – Barafostus Dreame

Gibbons – Pavan in G
Scheidt – Also geht’s, also steht’s
Bach – English Suite in D minor, BWV 811
Patrick Jones – Santoor Suite
Daniel Kidane – Six Etudes (world premiere)
Viktor Kalabis – Akvarely, op.53
W.F. Bach – Sonata in E-flat major, Fk.5

Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)

 

The Guildhall’s recently appointed Professor of Harpsichord, Mahan Esfahani, gave an inaugural recital, his first at Milton Court, in music by composers ranging from the Elizabethan virginalists to the present day. An ‘English’ emphasis was unmistakeable, even Bach represented by one of his English Suites, that in D minor. Far from that indicating any restriction, the hallmark of the recital was more variety, excellent performances throughout proving the guiding thread. In a typically engaging programme note, Esfahani wrote: ‘In English hands, the harpsichord truly came alive in all its guises – as a marvellously clear vehicle for counterpoint, as an effective imitator of whole ensembles and consorts, as an instrument of great sensuality as made possible by the confluence of various registers and harmonics naturally occurring in the sound made by a plucked string.’ Such was certainly what we seemed to hear on this occasion.

Thomas Tomkins’s variations on a broadside ballad, ‘Barafostus Dreame’ proved as ‘magnificent’ as was claimed in the performer’s note. Compositional and performing virtuosity sounded as one in a splendidly developmental account. Metre was subtly ‘bent’ on occasion, but always, it seemed, with a greater plan in mind, not for its own sake. Above all, there was a real sense of fantasy; it made sense as a performance in its own right, but also as the opening to a programme (perhaps rarer than one might expect). That characteristic ‘English’ melancholy which persists unto Birtwistle and beyond was certainly to be heard in the Orlando Gibbons Pavan. What sounded as if it were an infinitely flexible subdivision of the beat indicated a good deal of art concealing art – again both in work and performance. Samuel Scheidt’s seven variations on the German song, Also geht’s, also steht’s, offered a well-chosen staging-post on the way to Bach: a different voice, yes, even a different accent, but subtlety in technique that seemed also to offer continuation of a line.

Bach’s D minor English Suite completed the first half. In a short spoken introduction, Esfahani offered a way in to some of the composer’s complexities with a strikingly simple – in the best sense – demonstration of palindromic tendencies, both melodic and rhythmic. The opening Prelude initially resounded as if it announce Bach’s French inheritance – let us remember that a hallmark of earlier eighteenth-century German art, especially as understood by contemporaries, was its openness to different national ‘styles’ – but Bach’s undoubtedly Germanic legacy soon manifested itself ever more strongly. In the following Allemande and Courante, Esfahani struck a fine balance between phrases, paragraphs, and the whole, offering plenty of time, though never too much, for Bach’s music to speak in all its glory – and all its necessary complexity. The Sarabande’s proliferation seemed to this listener, doubtless partly on account of so much of his recent listening, to look forward to later Boulez. (If only we could hear some of the younger Boulez’s Bach performances!) The ‘busy’ quality of the first Gavotte was founded upon secure command of line, whilst the second benefited from typically imaginative yet idiomatic registration. The closing Fugue, perhaps in the light of my recently having heard Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, sounded as if a danse macabre. And of course, there were the inevitable labyrinthine presentiments of the Second Viennese School too. A well-shaped account throughout ensured that, once again, we heard that there is no composer less archaic than Bach.

There followed three very much more recent works, two from the twenty-first century, one from the twentieth. Patrick Jones’s Santoor Suite takes its cue, or at least a cue, from the composer’s study of south Indian raga, ‘specifically,’ according to Esfahani, ‘the “gat” (a cyclical, fixed melody)’. In its brief span, roughly five minutes in total, we heard an inventive response both to that world and indeed to the Baroque suite, a nicely, naggingly persistent Courante particularly striking to me on a first hearing. Daniel Kidane’s Six Etudes received their first complete performance. They definitely sounded as studies, for instance in the first piece’s treatment of repeated notes, the intervallic explorations of the second (and not just the second), and so on. A hotel reception bell made an appearance as duet partner (albeit operated by Esfahani’s foot) in the final piece.

Viktor Kalabis’s 1979 Akvarely (‘Aquarelles) seemed, again on a first hearing for me, almost to start, in its first movement, where Poulenc, in his Concert champêtre, had left off, and then, as it were, to run with whatever the composer had picked up. In this performance, I found it impossible to dissent from Esfahani’s view that this was most definitely music for the harpsichord, as opposed to ‘so much modern harpsichord music which seems like the word “piano” has simply been crossed from the title page’. The second piece revelled further in possibilities both musical and instrumental. At one point, it sounded almost as if a response to the celebrated solo in The Rake’s Progress.

Finally, there came a rare opportunity to hear a piece by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. I cannot say that I was entirely convinced, especially in the finale, by its stopping and starting: rhetorical, perhaps, but not with the mastery of the eldest son’s younger brother, Carl Philipp Emanuel. At any rate, this was a brilliantly ‘free’ performance, the slow movement at the work’s heart proving especially eloquent, indeed possessed of considerable harmonic depth.