Upon a Bank with Roses

Details:
The CD contains the first recordings of pieces by John Ward, including vocal pieces ‘apt for viols’. Professor Bryan selected the
pieces, made corrected editions, directed the ensemble and wrote the liner notes (2,000 words).

Portfolio:
1)The Rose Consort of Viols has given three performances of this repertory, at Spitalfields Festival; Dartington International
Summer School; Lancaster International Concert Series, Lancaster University; and it has been broadcast on WDR Köln.
2)Copies of programmes.

Context:
This CD results from ongoing research into the relationship between voices and viols in the performance of Elizabethan and
Jacobean repertory undertaken with the Rose Consort of Viols. This research has led to the Consort being the only such
ensemble to utilise accurate reproductions of English instruments surviving from the period, strung throughout in gut and with
‘clip in’ fixed frog bows. The Consort has developed a distinctive performance vocabulary, in which it imitates vocal inflections in
phrasing and timbre closely related to the texts set, but not always sung, or similar musical gestures implied by specific melodic,
rhythmic or harmonic idioms in purely instrumental music.
The specific research questions investigated in this CD concern the styles of performance appropriate to the different
repertories: English madrigals (performed untexted), pieces with Italian titles (possibly conceived to lost Italian madrigal texts),
and the purely instrumental fantasias. The CD also contends that the pieces preserved in F-Pc MS Rés. F770 are indeed by the
same composer as those found in numerous English sources rather than by another. It also suggests that the anonymous
Fantasia in GB-Och Mus MSS 459-62 that follows six by Ward is also his, as it contains similar stylistic features that become
clear through performance.

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