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GRAMOPHONE (12/2012)
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METCD1086
5028165108626 (IDV26)
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Reviewer: Julie Anne Sadie
Locke before and after his ‘broken
consort’ project
Peter Holman writes perceptively in the booklet about the
trajectory of Matthew Locke’s career from Exeter choirboy to musician at the
court of Charles I, exile on the Continent and later to the wilds of
Herefordshire, before finding himself reinstated as a composer at court in
1660. According to Holman, ‘the First Part of the Broken Consort, for two
violins and bass viol, was written in 1661 for a group of the same name that
had played contrapuntal music within the pre-war Private Music’ and cast in
six groups of four movements unified by a common key — a Fantazie followed
by three dances (Courante, Ayre and Saraband).
The Second Part is thought to have been
composed a little later, is more loosely conceived (Pavans instead of Fantazies
and a varied selection of dances to follow) and may have been left unfinished,
lacking, as it does, a final suite to make a set of six. Holman believes that
Locke abandoned the project when the first were not well received at court,
being thought old-fashioned; and, indeed, the Broken Consort itself was
dissolved in 1662 and replaced by the Twenty-Four Violins, who provided the king
with dance music in the French style. Locke’s Tripla Concordia (1677) for
the same combination of instruments was, perhaps, a belated riposte. The two
suites included on this CD begin with Pavans that mimic French overtures and
follow with fashionable dances of the day such as the Hornpipe in the G major
Suite. Performed here with the ease one might expect of an ensemble formed for
this purpose more than a quarter of a century ago, the Locke Consort do not
disappoint. They sympathetically gauge and shift between tempi, give due weight
within phrases to the chromatic inflections and syncopated motifs, and engage in
friendly imitative banter among themselves, always stylishly supported by the
theorbist Fred Jacobs (listen, for example, to the G minor Suite from the
Tripla Concordia). Of particular delight are the final suite of the First
Part — note the slow, upward chromatic suspensions of the Fantazie and the
deliciously varied echo effects in the Courante, Ayre and Saraband — and the
Country Dance from the Tripla Concordia (disc 1, tr 30), in which Locke
conjures up the sound of a braying donkey.
Delightful and unpretentious.
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