Andrew Grove

There is a quality in the music of the Celtic and Gaelic people that touches something deep inside us. It could be the home-spun folk rhythms that speak of good times with close friends. It could be the sound of a people who have been defined by dispossession, a sense of yearning for a homeland that can never be theirs. Or perhaps it is purely musical, a tradition whose core notes resound with the sound of the human spirit.

Pamela Thorby has been recording for Linn for most of the label’s existence, both as ensemble player and soloist. This time she joins Andrew Lawrence-King (except for a few unaccompanied pieces) in a varied program of music of the 16th and 17th centuries. In his notes, the harpist has an explanation for the disc title in the literary use of the garden as a place of earthly delights (Hieronymus Bosch’s allusion) where lovemaking is accompanied by recorders and plucked strings. His essay lucidly explains some of the terminology too often taken for granted in music of this period. Diego Ortiz, in Trattado de glosas of 1553, illustrated three ways of playing music on instruments; hence the program uses three of his examples at the beginning, middle, and end of this program.

HENRY PURCELL'S chamber opera, "Dido and Aeneas," is plentifully represented on disk, but Nicholas McGegan's new recording, with the Philharmonia Baroque and the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge is the freshest and most compelling since Andrew Parrott's magnificent account of 1981 (on Chandos). Mr. McGegan's soloists – Lorraine Hunt as Dido, Lisa Saffer as Belinda and Michael Dean as Aeneas – work wonders with the concise characterizations provided by Purcell and his librettist, Nahum Tate.