A long-gone era is brought movingly back to life
The Strad Issue: June 2025
Description: A long-gone era is brought movingly back to life
Musicians: Mathilde Vialle (bass viol) Thibaut Roussel (archlute) Ronan Khalil (virginals) Zachary Wilder (tenor)
Works: Music by Blow, Coprario, Hely, Hume, Kapsberger, Playford, Poole, Purcell, Reggio and Withy
Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902505
Two instruments, unplayed for centuries and now residing in Paris’s Musée de la Musique, and a 200-page manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale were the starting points for this collection of English music for viol and continuo from the second half of the 17th century.
The small bass viol marked ‘John Pitts in Paul’s Church Yarde 1679’ and the Venetian archlute of 1654 by Christoph Koch are the stars of the disc, the unique quality of their timbres finally audible after their years of silence.
Alongside familiar figures such as Purcell and Blow we hear music by the manuscript’s copyist, English Catholic violist Anthony Poole, exiled in St Omer. By calling two of his works St Fortunatus and St Martina he was perhaps trying to gain the approval of the Jesuit monks who had taken him in. Had they played them, they would have found them the liveliest of dances, full of double-stops and intricate cross-string work. Poole must have been quite the virtuoso, and Vialle rises to his challenge with her dextrous and stylish playing.
There is a feeling of intimacy and connection between the four musicians, who appear in various combinations in this recreation of a particular time and place in history, evocatively and skilfully recorded.
JANET BANKS
Read: In Focus: A 1669 Richard Meares bass viol
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