England Around 1600

However, his lute book, preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, tells another story, for it is among the most important sources of English and Continental instrumental music of this period. Almost all the major English lute composers of the era are represented, while the large number of works by Continental composers is probably a consequence of Lord Herbert’s extensive travels and wide range of acquaintance throughout Europe. The book also contains extraordinary and otherwise unknown works by Cuthbert Hely and Lord Herbert himself, a last echo of English lute music’s “Golden Age”.

Herbert’s major philosophical work, “De Veritate…” remained on the Catholic Church’s “Index of Forbidden Books” until 1966 and has earned him the title of the “Father of English Deism”. Deism can be described as a philosophical position that asserts that the existence of a benevolent supreme being can be ascertained through observation of the natural world and the use of human reason but denies the direct interference of God in the world, and revelation as a source of knowledge in religion. It follows from this that Deists are generally hostile to organised religion, a dangerous position in the early 17th Century. To his contemporaries, he was known as “The Dark Lord Herbert” – both on account of his physical appearance, and the obscurity of his ideas.

II. Les inAttendus: Poetical Humors (Vincent Lhermet, accordion/Marianne Muller, gamba). Harmonia Mundi CD HMM 902610. 

Marianne Muller (viola da gamba) and Vincent Lhermet (accordion) are interviewed for the booklet note, telling how they met both socially and musically at the International Summer Academy in Nice in 2015. Exploring repertoire, they soon found a kind of magic in the music of English composers from the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and there is some mixture of the ancient and the modern in this programme, with première recordings of pieces by Thierry Tidrow and Philippe Hersant adding piquancy to the Elizabethan pieces elsewhere.

There is a dolorous charm to much of the music here, and famous pieces such a Dowland’s Flow, my tears are given a gentle transparency through these arrangements. Contrast in this case comes from the more lively Can she excuse my wrongs, the accordion adding its strengths as a dancingly rhythmic powerhouse in proportion to the whole. Less familiar names such as Michael East and Tobias Hume brush up very well indeed in these performances, the echoes in the latter’s Touch me sweetely being very effective. The keyboard works of John Bull sound lovely on solo accordion, and the viola da gamba takes a solo in Tobias Hume’s Captain Hume’s Pavan, the melancholy voice of this instrument also taking up the dramatic poses in the music with poetic verve.

Thierry Tidrow’s Into Something Rich and Strange takes its atmosphere from Shakespeare’s ‘Full fathom five’ poem from The Tempest. High tones emerge from silence, and clustered dissonances and distorted melodic fragments illustrate the ‘magical and macabre’ in the text. Phillipe Hersant’s Lully Lullay grows out of a refrain heard in the Corpus Christi Carol, and as befits a cradle song, keeps up a gently rocking motion until ‘the wind starts to blow’ and things become shaken up with more virtuoso surprises and more emphatic variations on the theme. This is a tune that is now forever associated with Benjamin Britten, and the ethereal penultimate minutes with the gamba’s strumming come closest to that Britten ‘feel’, the concluding coda being almost a sea shanty.

This is a strikingly unusual recording and one which rattles around hauntingly in one’s consciousness long after being heard. The open cadence at the end of the CD in Dowland’s In darkness let me dwell is jaw-dropping indeed. If you love Elizabethan music and are intrigued by new sonorities then this is a field of rich pickings. There is plenty by which to be moved, and plenty to stimulate and tickle your intellect as well.

III. Lyra Sonora: Music for the 12 Course Lute (Anders Ericson, lute). Daphne CD 1061.