In Chains of Gold I

The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem Vol. I:

Orlando Gibbons - Complete Consort Anthems

In November 2016, together with the internationally renowned viol consort Fretwork and the distinguished historical brass ensemble His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, participated in an exciting project to restore the consort verse anthems of Orlando Gibbons to their rightful place, amongst the greatest creations of English sacred music. They were performed and recorded here for the first time in their entirety.

The performance of verse anthems today conjures up for many the comfortingly familiar sonority of Anglican choir and organ - masterpieces, such as This is the record of John and Behold, thou hast made my days, but performed in a style that is rooted in 19th century choral tradition. One thing we can be sure about is that they must have sounded very different to the audience of Gibbons' time. The very form of the verse anthem, a highly effective fusion of rhetorical declamation and dramatic response, was conceived in the heat of the English Reformation and we wanted to recapture something of its original urgency.

For this project, the Magdalena Consort worked with some of the UK's leading specialist singers: Julia Doyle, Catherine King, Eleanor Minney, Charles Daniels, Jeremy Budd, Samuel Boden, Nicholas Todd, Greg Skidmore, Simon Gallear and Will Gaunt under its director Peter Harvey.

Reviews have been very favourable, with the disc being a Gramophone 'Critics' Choice' for 2017.

Early Music Review

Orlando Gibbons – Complete Consort Anthems
Fretwork, His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, Magdalena Consort
Signum Classics, SIGCD 511

This splendid recording of all Orlando Gibbons' Consort Anthems, the brain-child of the knowledgeable and experienced Bill Hunt and the Orlando Gibbons project, is the first in what promises to be a definitive series of this highly English art form that flourished in the increasingly troubled years of the first half of the 17th century, when private chapels hosted much of the quality ecclesiastical music-making.

The collaboration between Fretwork and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts ensures playing of both wind and viol consort of world class standard, but what is exciting in this first CD is the quality of the singers assembled by Peter Harvey, and their attention to the sound-world of the contrasting groups of instrumentalists, used together only in Lord, grant grace. At the forefront of their concerns is the proper rhetorical declamation of the words, so we have a serious demonstration of what would have been called in contemporary Italy the seconda prattica. Here this word-based music is inspired by the verbal finesse of the texts, set with due regard for the 1559 Elizabethan injunction that the same may be as plainly understanded as if it were read without singing”.

The erudite - and sometimes over-fancifully-expressed - notes by David Pinto, whose 2003 editions for Fretwork are used here, chart the context of these compositions. They centre on the Chapel Royal, and Pinto makes a good case for using both wind and viol consorts. Gibbons worked in the Chapel with Launcelot Andrewes, possibly the Church of England's greatest wordsmith after Cranmer, and we see Gibbons apply a sensitivity to setting the texts that set new standards for declamatory composition that was taken up by his contemporaries like Thomas Tomkins. The combination of A=466 and the conviction that the basic vocal group should respect the clef and pitch of the composer's intentions give us that essential singing group of Soprano or Mean, Contra or High Tenors, Low Tenor/Baritone and Bass. This vocal consort matches the rich instrumental textures admirably and is provided by Peter Harvey's splendidly balanced Magdalena Consort. Singing groups who overload their top lines in the tradition of cathedral choirs, or who raise the pitch to make room for 18th-century-style falsettists, take note!

The elegant restraint showed by every singer in matching not only their tone but their volume to that of the halo of instruments in the single voice or duet passages only very occasionally, when singers and players are going at full tilt, gives way to the temptation to oversing. Just occasionally – as, for example, in the Gloria of Blessed are all they that fear the Lord – this runs the risk of defeating the careful balance between voices and instruments. The desire to sing out – to make sure that your line is clearly audible – is so often just what singers feel is natural to do, and what indeed so many directors encourage them to do. The sense that your singers can notch up a gear without running the risk of vulgar, quasi-operatic distortion is almost too great to resist. But this is just the moment to urge restraint. None is necessary when the limpid Charles Daniels – peerless in this clean and intricate figuration, as in This is the record of John – or the two upper voices of Eleanor Minney and Sam Boden in Lord, grant grace are singing so perfectly together, but very occasionally I longed to say 'Hold it: if you all sing out like that, the texture is getting too thick, and I can hear less, not more, of the exquisite lines.' I experienced a touch of that over-ripeness from the upper voices of Catherine King and Eleanor Minney in the full sections of O all true and faithful hearts. Perhaps when they felt competition from the cornetti?

This elegant restraint is what comes naturally to consort players, who spend their time listening to each other, pulling back from the long, held notes, and waiting for the moment when they lead off in some short note-value thread of imitative writing where the figuration leads to an expressive syllable or word when the line is vocalised.

This - in a fine quotation from Morley's Plaine and Easie Introduction - is just what Hunt puts on the title page, and is worth quoting here in full:

"... to return to the expressing of the ditty, the matter is now come to that state that though a song be never so well made and never so aptly applied to the words yet shall you hardly find singers to express it as it ought to be, for most of our churchmen, so that they can cry louder in their choir than their fellows, care for no more, whereas by the contrary they ought to study how to vowel and sing clean, expressing their words with devotion and passion whereby to draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things."

This is the finest recording of this quintessentially English music that we are likely to have, and I urge everyone to start collecting these volumes as they appear over the coming years. This is a real treat, and an impressive master-class in how these texts should be declaimed.

David Stancliffe, January 10, 2018

GRAMOPHONE: Critics' Choice 2017: the year's best-loved classical recordings

Gibbons 'In Chains of Gold: The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem, Vol 1'
Magdalena Consort; Fretwork; His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts
Signum

Fretwork and the Magdalena Consort's fresh take on Gibbons's consort anthems ask all sorts of awkward questions – such as what types of instruments, pitches and voices might have been expected in private Jacobean chapels – and comes up with a beguiling synergy of curiosity, creativity and musical insights.

David Vickers

Agora Classica

Glorious Gibbons, both rare and well-loved, reaches an apogee of expression in this anthology featuring genuine consort/chamber/chapel forces. Revealed as early Protestant sacred music of the highest order, all elements combine in a micro-universe of sonorous delight – not only in a celebration of Gibbons's exquisite musical craftsmanship, but also with the texts given their true interpretational, devotional prominence. Subtle, seductively supple and sinuous singing and playing breathe vivid life into works we have grown used to hearing in more massive interpretations. Volume two from this dream-team will be eagerly awaited.

REBECCA TAVENER

Planet Hugill praises 'In Chains of Gold'

Orlando Gibbons complete consort anthems; Magdalena Consort, Fretwork, His Majesties Sagbutts and Cornetts; Signum
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on Feb 02 2018
Star rating: 4.5

Gibbons' verse anthems restored to their original intimate, instrumental format in finely judged performances

Orlando Gibbons' verse anthems have rightly become popular with cathedral and collegiate choirs in versions for choir, soli and organ often transposed up from the original keys. This new disc from the Magdalena Consort (director Peter Harvey), Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts and artistic director William Hunt on Signum Records presents us with Gibbons' complete surviving consort anthems in a recording which aims to re-capture the more intimate, instrumental accompanied versions of the anthems.

What we know of Gibbons' anthems is relatively limited yet one important manuscript, probably copied for Gibbons' family some time after his death, provides us with verse anthems with instrumental parts. Gibbons worked for King James I and many of these anthems were written for court use, for the relatively intimate confines of the King's chapel. The performances on this disc use the presumed pitch of the period, A466, with a set of English viols (including two original instruments) tuned to this pitch and the vocal parts taken by women (treble and mean), high tenors, tenors and bass, and ensemble of eleven singers and five viols, with sackbutts and cornetts used in some of the grander pieces.

The results are quite intimate, more consort than choral with the solo parts naturally emerging from the tutti vocal textures. Textures which are light and transparent, this is more chamber music than anything else. The best known anthem must be This is the record of John, here with Charles Daniels taking the highly expressive solo line and voice interweaving wonderfully with the viols. This is how it works, the sense of large scale chamber music is palpable, singers and instrumentalists working alongside each other. The anthems with sackbuts, cornetts and organ have a grander feel, Great King of Gods and O all true faithful hearts whilst the final anthem on the disc, Lord, grant grace uses viols, sackbuts, cornetss and organ.

We know a little about the circumstances of the creation of these works. O King of Gods was written in 1617 for King James' return to Scotland, whilst Do not repine was a welcome song for that 1617 progress. Blessed are all they was written for the marriage of King James' then favourite, Robert Kerr. This is the record of John was commissioned by William Laud (not yet Archbishop), and Behold though hast made my day was written for Dr Maxcie, Dean of Windsor, just before his death.

The recording is completed with Gibbons' three In Nomines, wonderful evocations of a style which was old in Gibbons' day.

We don't know a great deal about Orlando Gibbons' consort anthems, but this new disc evinces a welcome curiosity for the possibilities of a more intimate madrigalian style of performance. It helps that all the performers are beautifully stylish, and the ensemble of soloists (vocal and instrumental) each works with the other to create something stylish and poised.

This is volume one of a projected series on the English Pre-Restoration Consort Anthem – I can't wait for volume two!

AllMusic

Review by James Manheim

The English verse anthem of the 17th century was a contradictory form, progressive in some ways, conservative in others. Leading composers of the early part of the century, including Gibbons, Byrd, Weelkes, and, daringly, John Bull all wrote them, but they have never had the wide appeal of the more intimate madrigal and motet. This is the first recording of the complete consort verse anthems of Gibbons, who did much to advance the form. His anthems are grand, intricate works, seemingly written for imposing occasions, and they are virtuoso works of counterpoint. Sample the two-section Do not repine, fair sun for an idea of why Glenn Gould valued Gibbons so highly. The progressive side came from the structural contrast built in between solo voices (taken from the small choir) and the full group, which brought in hints of contemporary Italian developments. The anthems were also in English, and their texts were meant to be understood, not repeated by rote. The most famous Gibbons anthem, This is the record of John, is also here; it's a fine example of the text-centered nature of these works. This is where this all-star ensemble recording falls short. The combination of the fine instrumental ensembles Fretwork and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts produces a suitably splendid sound, but it tends to swallow up the singers of Peter Harvey's Magdalena Consort, and listeners will need printed texts even though they're fairly familiar ones. The recording is at St. George's Church, Chesterton, Cambridge, a place where the anthems would be more likely to have been accompanied by an organ, and their structures to have been more clear than they are here.

Classical Modern Music

In Early Music, you can freeze a moment in time, and if you lovingly reconstruct the moment and the moment is a good one there can be magic. Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbuts and Cornetts, and the Magdalena Consort take a passing but valuable moment in the English Pre-Reformation, freeze it and reconstruct it with stunning sonance. And so we have Orlando Gibbons' Complete Consort Anthems as Volume 1 of The English Pre-Reformation Verse Anthem, In Chains of Gold (Signum 511).

The music is performed with period accuracy and vital enthusiasm. The title comes from a 1597 text by Thomas Morley, where he expresses the desire for a choral ensemble that "draw[s] the hearer...in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things." Gibbons' Anthems provide ample means, an eloquent contrapuntal, mellifluous vehicle to allow the choral Magdalena Consort a way clear to some profound, earthy heaven of music. They and their instrumental cohorts give us every reason to appreciate this music in all its specific period glory.

The vocalist are beautifully central to this fine program. They articulate each part with a kind of period purity that brings out the ravishing starkness without artifice, a sweetness born of immersion and singular focus.

The brass ensemble has great color. It punctuates and gives breath and breadth to the soundings when it is present. Harp and organ plus five viols add sonorous depth and a special glow this period music attains when allowed to return to its proper instrumentation and method of delivery.

Gibbons has in the past suffered from lackluster and inauthentic performance practices. You might say that of much of the vocal music of similar time and place, certainly in the period of recordings from say 1950-1970. But Gibbons enchants when he is allowed to sound as he wished to sound. The Magdalena Consort and accompaniment give us every reason to grasp and embrace the unfrozen moment of music we may have been in too great a hurry to stop and truly appreciate until now. We have a rare opportunity here to stop the rush toward ever changing teleology that music history can often be. It matters not for the moment what came before, what came after.

We are invited to savor the beauty of what once was for a time only, yet speaks to us now without a need to put together before and after. That is what the Early Music movement does at its best. The Consort and assembled musicians give us ideal readings. It allows us to experience what once was in ways that embody yet transcend a time long gone. Kudos! Any adventuresome listener, archaist, or wide-eared adept will find this program enlightening and enrapturing. Highly recommended.

Grego Applegate Edwards

Gramophone

Don't start playing this disc at the beginning. Skip straight to track 3 and Gibbons's first In nomine a 5, and listen to the blanched brilliance, the glistening cobweb delicacy of tone from Fretwork's viols. If something feels unfamiliar, electric almost in its charge, then it's down to the tuning, which puts the consort up to the perilous heights of A466 for this recording – a 'perfectly likely tuning' for this repertoire, according to a booklet note by the album's artistic director William Hunt. The effect, in the three In nomines recorded here, is of uncanny beauty, familiar notes polished up to a new sheen and lustre.

This innovation alone makes 'In Chains of Gold', an album of Orlando Gibbons's consort anthems (Vol 1 of a planned set), worth investigating. Whether you'll choose to return quite as often to the anthems themselves is another matter. Fretwork are joined here not only by His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts – lending some burnished colours and glowing contrapuntal detail to 'Great King of Gods', 'O all true faithful hearts' and 'Lord, grant grace' – but also by Peter Harvey's Magdalena Consort.

This ensemble matches Fretwork's authentic tuning with intimate forces, whose upper voices include not only trebles and means but also contratenors, taking lines more usually sung now by altos. But among such few voices any blots are keenly evident, and the now acid-toned and lumpy tenor of Charles Daniels blurts out too often for comfort. His solos in 'Behold, thou hast made my days' and 'Great King of Gods' lurch in and out of focus, distorting the clarity and shape of Gibbons's lovely lines. It's a tendency that proves catching, and while there are some fine moments (especially from the basses), these anthems lack the character and sustained beauty of rival recordings.

Alexandra Coghlan

Music Web International

Orlando GIBBONS (1583-1625)
In Chains of Gold - Complete Consort Anthems
Kirsty Whatley (harp), Silas Woolston (organ)
Magdalena Consort, Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts. William Hunt
rec. 2016, St George's Church, Cambridge

The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem - Volume 1
SIGNUM CLASSICS SIGCD511 [66:38]

Gibbons has become best-known for his vocal music, particularly his sacred output. It comprises a number of Services, which include settings of texts like Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, the Jubilate and the Te Deum. The largest part consists of anthems, either full anthems for a choir for four to eight voices, or verse anthems. The latter are scored for one or several solo voices, choir and organ. The use of the organ was common practice in most churches. However, such anthems could also be performed in chapels, among them the Royal Chapel, and in the private chapels of members of the aristocracy. Here the line-up was more varied. In the Royal Chapel, for instance, the voices could be supported by a consort of viols.

The verse anthems usually open with a section for one or several solo voices. This entire section - or sometimes its second half - is then repeated by the choir. The same happens in the next section, until the end of the piece. Gibbons' anthems are rooted in the stile antico, which means that they are dominated by counterpoint. That not only manifests itself in the tutti episodes, but also in the passages for solo voices, thanks to the participation of a consort of viols. Gibbons was also a composer of madrigals, in which he paid much attention to the musical illustration of the text. The same thing can be observed in his anthems. That is the case here, for instance, in the phrase "and by rising to life again" in We praise thee, o Father, where the text is depicted by ascending figures. The various voices sing descending figures on the words "when I go down into the pit" (Sing unto the Lord). The verse anthems are largely syllabic and Gibbons' word setting is strongly declamatory. Performers should not exaggerate here; this is not Italian music in the style of Caccini or Monteverdi. The singers of the Magdalena Consort are well aware of this; just here and there I observed an emphasis on single words which seemed a little overdone.

Some of Gibbons' verse anthems are well-known; that goes especially for See, see, the Word is incarnate and This is the record of John. Far lesser known are Lord, grant grace and Do not repine, fair sun. The latter is a special case, as the text is not sacred, but secular. It is "a welcome ode for that Scottish Progress of 1617, to mildly pagan verse by Joseph Hall, one of the English bishops corralled into dancing attendance”, David Pinto writes in the booklet.

The very fact that some of them are seldom performed justifies a complete recording of Gibbons' verse anthems. However, there are a couple of aspects of the interpretation which make it even more interesting. The first concerns the pitch. "The sacred anthems and instrumental pieces on this recording are performed at A466, which fits closely with the findings of recent research into English organ and choir pitch of the period, confirmed by the evidence of some surviving cornetts", William Hunt states in his notes on the performance. As a result the parts usually sung by altos - either male or female - are performed here by contratenors, high tenors comparable with the French-type of haute-contres. It allows the performance of these pieces at written pitch, whereas a participation of altos requires an upward transposition.

The viols are 'smaller-scale' English instruments, which have equally been tuned at A466, "something that, as far as we are aware, has not hitherto been done with an English consort". Hunt believes that it creates "a remarkable translucency", and that is confirmed by this recording, not only in the vocal items, but also the three In Nomines. It is probably something to get used to for those who often listen to English consort music at a lower pitch. I have already referred to the fact that the participation of a consort of viols in sacred music was mostly confined to private chapels. Here an instrument like the harp may also have been used. The harp was quite common at the time, but its role in English music of the 17th century is poorly documented on disc.

Lastly, in some items the instrumental parts are played by an ensemble of cornetts and sackbuts. Unfortunately Hunt doesn't mention this aspect. There can be no doubt that these instruments were played in England during the 17th century. One of the best-known pieces for cornetts and sackbuts is Matthew Locke's Music for His Majesty's Sackbuts & Cornetts. However, I have always assumed that they were almost exclusively used in open-air performances. However, it seems that they, like the harp, rank among those instruments, which were played in private chapels.

Obviously much effort has been made to create a performance, which does justice to the historical circumstances, in which Gibbons's verse anthems were performed. From that angle it is disappointing that the performers didn't go one step further by adopting a historical pronunciation of English. In this case the use of modern English is probably less problematic as here the texts don't include rhyme, which is where the difference between historical and modern English manifests itself most clearly. Even so, it would have contributed to an even stronger sense of 'authenticity'.

Overall I liked the performances. Charles Daniels is especially impressive in his interpretations of the contratenor parts, for instance in Behold, thou hast made my days and This is the record of John. Most of the other singers also do well in their solo episodes. Unfortunately some of them use quite a bit of vibrato, which is historically untenable and also damages the tutti episodes. However, it did not spoil my enjoyment and it does not withhold me from urging anyone, who is interested in this repertoire, to add this disc to his collection. Apart from Gibbons' excellent music, this disc offers some particularly interesting perspectives with regard to performance practice. I eagerly look forward to further instalments in this project.

Johan van Veen
www.musica-dei-donum.org