The Muses Restor’d
Works by Blow, Handel, Locke, Purcell et al
Rachel Podger (violin); Brecon Baroque
Channel Classics CCS46324 80:42 mins
This is a captivating programme offering proof, if it were needed, that England is far from ‘a land without music’. In a generous album, violinist Rachel Podger and her period ensemble Brecon Baroque journey through 17th-century English consorts to virtuosic solo music from the early Georgian period.
The ensemble is a coterie of some of the finest early musicians on the scene today – friends who evidently relish the art of musical conversation, the guiding ethos of the English consort tradition. Matthew Locke’s Little Consort ‘for several friends’ encapsulates the essence of this congenial idiom, with its fleeting musical dialogues, light and transparent as sparkling crystals, all eloquently rendered. Lovely, too, is the discreet give and take between the instrumentalists in Lawes’s Fantasia-Suite No. 8. They weave a more intricate discourse in the A minor Fantasia-Suite by John Jenkins, whose virtuosic passagework prefigures the Baroque style. Indeed, the album makes a chain of interesting connections between genres, styles and periods.
Among the Baroque works are two violin sonatas by Purcell and Handel. Podger and her continuo players capture the pathos and quasi-operatic quality of Purcell’s G minor work and they give a radiant account of Handel’s D major Sonata in which harpsichordist Marcin Świątkiewicz’s inventive realisations shine.
The programme also unveils less familiar pieces: Johann Schop’s wistful , recalling Dowland’s celebrated ‘Tears’, and a work by the shadowy but brilliant composer Richard in A minor the musicians bring passion and rhetoric.
