As we approach another uncertain Christmas, perhaps Fretwork’s new recording is the music we need. This may be a festive compilation, but the Tudor (and Stuart) Christmases these pieces were written for would have been preceded by weeks of Advent fasting, rather like Easter following Lent, and there’s as much contemplation here as there is rejoicing. These viol pieces and consort songs were private music, and the atmosphere is inward-looking.
The title is a bit approximate considering that a fair bit of the music here was written in the years after Elizabeth’s death, but the sequence of 17 pieces has been carefully thought out with regard to key and to the subtly evolving mood. At the centre of it is William Byrd’s Lullaby, bemoaning the days “when wretches have their will”; this is surrounded with less solemn yet still quiet expressions of hopefulness and devotion by Byrd and Martin Peerson, and a short, slightly risque madrigal-like number by Thomas Weelkes. The songs are beautifully delivered by the mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston, who sings with firm yet confiding tone and lends the same sense of potentially endless expansion to her lines as do the viol players. A handful more singers lend occasional choral support.
The songs are interspersed with instrumental pieces: short dances by Anthony Holborne, with suitably Christmassy titles from The Cradle to Heigh Ho Holiday, and two of Orlando Gibbons’s Fantasias “for Ye Great Dooble Bass”, in which the lowest viol adds a new sonorous richness. As played by the five members of Fretwork, each piece unfolds with its own calm yet unstoppable momentum; harmonies crunch and grind but can always be relied on to resolve, steadily and with absolute inevitability. There’s a feeling of consolation here that you can hunker down with, however you’re feeling about the festive season this year.
This week’s other pick
Mirrors is an enormously promising debut from the Trinidadian soprano Jeanine De Bique. Arias for five Handel heroines (or antiheroines) are paired with numbers that Handel’s contemporaries wrote for those characters in their own operatic versions of the stories. The fast arias will strike you first: De Bique is dazzling, cartwheeling through all the notes with buoyant clarity, spurred on by Concerto Köln and its director Luca Quintavalle. But she makes beautiful work of the slow numbers too, spinning out long lines on a silvery thread of voice; the final track – an aria for the sorceress Alcina by Broschi – is mesmerising.
