Matthew Locke: Anthems,Motets,Ceremonial Music (CD)

Anthems,Motets,Ceremonial Music

Choir Of New College Oxford, The Parley of Instruments

CD

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Matthew Locke (1622-1677): Anthems,Motets,Ceremonial Music, CD

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Künstler: New College Choir Oxford, The Parley of Instruments, Higginbottom
Label: Hyperion, DDD, 89
Erscheinungstermin: 24.12.1998

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Matthew Locke was born in 1621 or 1622, in Devon, and received his musical training at Exeter cathedral, where he was a chorister. Not much is known of his career during the Civil War. He was certainly in the Netherlands in 1648, when he copied a collection of Italian motets, and he had probably returned to England by 1651, when he composed his earliest collection of consort music, The Little Consort, for a friend in Exeter. He evidently spent most of the 1650s in London, where he wrote music for several of William Davenant’s dramatic entertainments, including The Siege of Rhodes of 1656, often thought of as the first English opera. In 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne and the court was reassembled, Matthew Locke effectively assumed the position of England’s leading composer, for most of his senior colleagues, such as Henry Lawes, Nicholas Lanier and John Jenkins, were too old to take an active part in the court’s musical affairs. For the next quarter of a century Locke divided his time between writing music for the royal orchestra, the Twenty-four Violins, supervising chamber music in the private royal apartments, playing the organ in the Catholic chapel of Charles II’s Portuguese queen, Catherine of Braganza (Locke was himself a Catholic), and writing music for Davenant’s London theatre company. He died in the summer of 1677, and was commemorated in an eloquent elegy by his young friend and probable pupil, Henry Purcell.

In this recording we have tried to reproduce the effect of performances in Oxford and London under the direction of the composer. We chose the relatively dry acoustic of Rosslyn Hill Chapel in Hampstead because Whitehall chapel was only about 75' by 30', and the music school at Oxford was even smaller. Male voices are used throughout; women began to sing in English choirs only in the 1770s. The normal practice in the Chapel Royal and at Oxford was to use one-to-a-part strings, but we have used orchestras in Be thou exalted, Lord and Descende caelo cincta sororibus because they were written for special occasions; the score of the former specifies a ‘band of violins’, and the surviving performing material of Oxford academic odes have duplicate string parts. These Oxford parts also reveal that bass stringed instruments played with the violins, leaving the solo vocal sections just to continuo instruments. A variety of continuo instruments were used on occasion at Oxford, including theorbos and plucked keyboards in addition to the music school organ, a four-stop Dallam instrument.

Rezensionen

'Stylishly performed and intelligently directed' (Early Music)

'La interpretación es excelente' (Scherzo, Spain)

Rezensionen

F.P. Messmer in FonoForum 2/91:"Den Musi- kern gelingt es, die Klangfülle und vor allem die berühmte Weichheit von Lockes Musik darzustellen. Der Wohlklang und die Schönheit dieser Musik sind außerordentlich. Hier kann nicht nur ein Komponist, sondern auch ein hervorragendes Ensemble entdeckt werden."