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GRAMOPHONE (05/2024)
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Channel Classics CCS46324) 

Code barres / Barcode : 0723385463245

Reviewer : Charlotte Gardner

Handel, Lawes, Blow, Locke, Purcell, Schop, Jenkins, Baltzar and Jones; sonatas, suites, concerts, grounds and popular tunes … this exploration of post-1660 English music and its influences from Rachel Podger plays out as a veritable cornucopia of musical shapes and languages. Also as a very intimate offering, given this is a body of repertoire which, for all its variety, rarely expands beyond three parts – meaning Podger is joined by just four of her Brecon Baroque colleagues: Reiko Ichise (six-string bass viol), Felix Knecht (violoncello), Elizabeth Kenny (archlute, theorbo, lutes, Baroque guitar) and Marcin S´wia?tkiewicz (harpsichord, organ).

Intimacy of forces is mirrored by intimacy of approach, Handel’s Violin Sonata in D opening as a flowing, gently congenial conversation between two equals, Podger’s silvery tone fluctuating appealingly between puritan dryness and greater chime, to S´wia?tkiewicz’s similarly airily silvery Flemish ravelement twomanual harpsichord (after Ruckers) – fireside Handel between friends. After this the variety comes thick and fast, starting with Lawes’s Fantasia-Suite in D, whose more involved counterpoint and quiet sobriety sound arguably more Germanic than London’s bona fide German has just done – and through the prism of an entirely new set of colours, keyboard continuo now coming from organ, joined by viol, violoncello and Italian-modelled theorbo.

I mentioned Johann Schop (1590-1667), and what a charmer this Hamburg violinist-composer’s intricate, gossamerweight take on Dowland’s Lachrimae is, Podger in close-knit duet just with Kenny on a 10-course lute. Further pleasures include the many shapes of seductive curve to Podger’s articulation across Purcell’s Sonata in G minor, Z780, and the palpable conviviality across Locke’s Little Consort in Two Parts for Severall Friends in C minor-major V, not least its chirpy, perky, airy, earthy, blink-and-you-miss-it inner Saraband.

I could go on, but it’s not necessary. Just tune in and enjoy.

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