Viol Consort

Henry Purcell's Fantazias for viol consort came late to the game; written in 1680 and modeled to some extent after the work of Matthew Locke, the parade had gone by for the viol consort. Despite the fact that the Fantazias and In nomines stood as Purcell's main achievement in the field of chamber music, they did not appear in print until 1959 and weren't recorded until Nikolaus Harnoncourt waxed the cycle for a Vanguard LP in 1965. By the time of the tri-centenary observance of Purcell's death in 1995, quite a few ensembles had joined the game with new recordings, and that year Jordi Savall and Hesperion XX entered the fray with an Astrée recording so outstanding that it was hard to imagine how one could surpass it.

Viola da gamba player Vittorio Ghielmi is the founder of the viol consort Il Suonar Parlante, which plays Purcell's Fantazias of Four Parts, mostly written in 1680. At that time, the viol was on the way to being considered an archaic instrument, having been largely replaced by the fretless members of the violin family. A consort of viols, though, was still the most convenient ensemble for playing contrapuntal music, and Purcell needed an outlet for adventurous self-expression as a break from his duties of writing conventional dance music for King Charles II. The fantasias he wrote are indeed very odd, particularly in their chromatic harmonies, many of which would not reappear with regularity in the Western musical vocabulary until the twentieth century.

Compiled from pieces that were clearly composed much earlier as well as from more recent works, the Deuxième Livre pays homage to its two masters and calls for tonalities that it had not yet employed; it evokes the past and the great lutenists of that time with the Pavane and yet also contains important innovations. It is truly a transitional work: published at the very dawn of the century, it opened the doors to the important stylistic changes that French music would undergo during the Age of Enlightenment.

Naxos has collected its four volume traversal of the lute music into a handy slipcase. All the volumes are available singly, but you can also buy the four together as a quartet of excellence, presided over by Nigel North, the acknowledged hero of the hour. What follows is a reprise of two volumes already reviewed - volumes 1 and 3 - and a look at volumes 2 and 4.

One of the finest Christmas recordings ever made, this 1994 production by the Baltimore Consort makes a welcome return (complete with a new cover) along with the revival of the Dorian label. Glowing with the high, clear soprano of Custer LaRue and brimming with versatile, virtuoso instrumental work by Mary Anne Ballard (viols, rebec), Mark Cudek (cittern, Baroque guitar, viols, bandora), Larry Lipkis (viol, recorder, gemshorn), Ronn McFarlane (lute), Chris Norman (wooden flutes, pennywhistle), and Webb Wiggins (organ), this program literally lives up to the promise of its title.