The Virtuoso Organist Tudor & Jacobean Masterworks The Taylor & Boody Organ (Opus 66) of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge Stephen Farr RES10143 The Virtuoso Organist William Byrd (c. 1540-1623) Anonymous Tudor & Jacobean Masterworks 1. A Voluntarie for my ladye nevell [5:05] 10. Magnificat [10:21] John Bull (1562/3-1628) Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) 2. Galliard [1:59] 11. Fantasia [6:04] Stephen Farr organ Anonymous William Byrd 3. Bina caelestis II [8:19] 12. A Fancie [5:08] The Taylor & Boody Organ (Opus 66) John Bull [68:35] of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 4. In nomine [II] [4:34] Total playing time Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) with 5. Ecce tempus idoneum [3:49] The Gentlemen of the Choir of Sidney Sussex College Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656) directed by David Skinner 6. Offertory [17:30] John Blitheman (1525-1591) 7. Gloria tibi Trinitas [I] [2:15] 8. Gloria tibi Trinitas [IV] [2:15] John Bull About Stephen Farr: 9. Coranto Joyeuse [1:08] ‘Farr rises to the occasion, turning in performances that are as varied and vital as the music demands, intricate details inked with telling clarity’ Choir and Organ '[...] one can simply enjoy Farr's rock steady rhythmic playing, crisp articulation and commanding overview. His approach is refreshingly unfussy and quirk free’ Gramophone The Virtuoso Organist: September 1591. Tudor and Jacobean Masterworks The ‘Lady Nevell’ was Elizabeth, wife of Sir We begin and end in 1591 when the Henry Nevell of Billingbear in Berkshire, composer William Byrd collaborated with which was located near to Byrd’s home in one of the most gifted Elizabethan music Harlington and also to Baldwin’s workplace copyists, John Baldwin, to produce ‘My as a tenor lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Ladye Nevells Booke’ – the finest surviving Windsor Castle.2 Although no evidence manuscript of Tudor keyboard music.1 survives of Lady Nevell’s interest in Acquired from the Abergavenny family keyboard music, or skill as a virginalist, by the British Library in 2006, this the inviting legibility of her eponymous manuscript contains forty-two pieces, manuscript begs for it to be opened, all by Byrd himself, copied in Baldwin’s perused and played. Perhaps it was a most formal hand. The large-format fiftieth birthday present: Lady Nevell had notation is pin-sharp, with easy-to-read, been born in 1541, not long after William diamond-headed notes and elegantly Byrd himself. The first part of the book turned quaver beams; each piece begins comprises sociable music for the virginals: wherever possible on the topmost stave ‘my ladye nevells grownde’, ‘the battell’ of the folio (and preferably the left-hand (a naïve narrative suite), and numerous side or verso), minimizing the incidence pavans and galliards. The second half of of inopportune page-turns; occasional the book is more varied in its contents, fingerings help the player to avoid some of which could be played on either embarrassment while the correcting virginals or organ. The penultimate item hand of another musician, probably in the book, A fancie (track 12), is also Byrd himself, intervenes on those rare found in a near-contemporary manuscript occasions where Baldwin’s precision is copied by the church musician and less than absolute. To help the player madrigalist, Thomas Weelkes (British Library, find each piece, an index at the back Add. 30485). This is a classic exposition of of the volume lists each piece (or ‘songe’) Byrd’s mature fantasia style, in which strict and the leaf where it can be found. counterpoint alternates with episodes of At the end of this index Baldwin recorded, dazzling fingerwork, particularly during perhaps with some relief, the completion the inexorable progression towards the of this exacting commission on 11 final cadence. The latter part of ‘My Ladye Nevells Booke’ pre-Reformation tradition. As part of his begins with A voluntarie for my ladye nevell musical education, perhaps as a chorister at (or ‘the voluntarie lesson’: track 1): unique St Paul’s Cathedral, Byrd would have learnt to this manuscript, it was probably a the craft of counterpoint partly through bespoke composition for Lady Nevell. the medium of organ playing. Apparently The terms ‘voluntary’ and ‘lesson’, first copied at St Paul’s around 1560, the Mulliner found in the 1560s in keyboard manuscripts Book anthologizes the kinds of idioms learnt such as the Mulliner Book (British Library, by young musicians by the middle of the Add. 30513), perhaps recall an uneasy sixteenth century: cantus firmus pieces, phase of transition when the organ, a free-composed ‘voluntaries’, dances, mainstay of Catholic worship, had arrangements of part songs and anthems, struggled to establish a permanent role and snippets from large-scale compositions within the reformed liturgy. A reprimand selected as compositional exemplars. Among suffered by Byrd for over-elaborate these contents are two versets by Thomas organ-playing may have contributed to Tallis for the Lenten hymn Ecce tempus his decision to leave Lincoln Cathedral idoneum (Track 5). Composed either in the in 1572 for the security and professional early 1540s or mid-1550s, Tallis’s setting fulfilment of the Chapel Royal. Although demonstrates the craft of ‘breaking’ or less showy than some of his keyboard masking of the plainsong: the hymn tune fantasias, ‘A voluntarie for my ladye is played by the left hand (in the tenor nevell' brings the mature composer’s voice) but, lightly paraphrased, it provides easy, vocal-style declamation to bear imitative material for the other voices, upon this early-Elizabethan genre. In his which weave fuga around it. restraint Byrd shows himself the true master of the keyboard: fast fingerwork Byrd and Tallis were to serve together in makes its appearance here only in the Elizabeth I’s Chapel Royal from the early final bars by way of cadential flourish. 1570s until Tallis died in 1585, and collaborated in the publication of a The keyboard pieces of William Byrd and collection of Latin sacred music, Cantiones other Elizabethan virginalists witness the Sacrae, in 1575. One of the last generation emergence of a distinctive English keyboard of musicians to spend their formative years tradition, but one which stemmed from exclusively in the service of the Latin liturgy, (and was in some ways haunted by) the Tallis provided Byrd with first-hand witness to the old traditions which Byrd, in turn, genres, and so it is perhaps no surprise to handed down to the next generation find his pupil writing a Galliard and Coranto (breaking of the plainsong is one of the (tracks 2 and 9). The Corante or ‘Courante traditional contrapuntal methods described Joijeuse van Jan Bull Doctor’ is preserved by Thomas Morley, also of the Chapel Royal, in a manuscript copied in 1628 in the Low in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Countries where Bull had fled in 1613 to Practicall Musicke of 1597). Another link to escape an adultery scandal (British Library, the recent pre-Reformation past was Add. 23623); the Galliard ‘to the Pavin in provided by John Blitheman of the Chapel D sol re’ is found in five sources, among Royal, whose five settings of the antiphon them Benjamin Cosyn’s Virginal Book of Gloria tibi Trinitas recall Oxford during the 1620 (British Library, Royal MS 23.L.4). golden 1520s when John Taverner of This latter manuscript was copied by Cosyn Cardinal College wrote his influential Mass shortly before he became organist of St based on the same Trinitarian melody. Lawrence, Ludlow (he ended his career The settings performed here (tracks 7-8) as organist of the Charterhouse, London, showed the budding organist how to until he was discharged on the abolition play in three parts, with plainsong in of Anglicanism in 1643); Cosyn’s book either bass or tenor, using repeating also includes Fancy in Gam ut flatt (Fantasia melodic cells and melodic dialogue – track 11), an extended and mature essay between the added voices. in imitative fantasia by Orlando Gibbons, gentleman of James I’s Chapel Royal. John Bull, the younger Elizabethan keyboard virtuoso, was taught by Blitheman as a Thomas Tomkins’s Offertory (track 6) is child of the Chapel Royal before receiving the most enigmatic piece presented here. tuition from Byrd himself. Blitheman’s It is the latest composition, and yet profoundly impact can clearly be seen in Bull’s second retrospective. Its title alludes to the lost In nomine (track 4), which also quotes tradition of keyboard settings of plainsong from John Taverner’s Mass Gloria tibi offertories, but it is built out of a seven-note Trinitas and uses melodic cells ostinato ACBCDBA which recalls the melodic like Blitheman’s Gloria tibi Trinitas incipit of the old Lady Mass offertory, Felix V, which breaks into triple time in its namque (which was used by Tallis in a latter stages. Pavan-Galliard pairs were pair of extended settings which Tomkins one of William Byrd’s favourite keyboard probably knew). Offertories had been the most long-winded genre within the pre- the more laconic ‘a good 2 parts’. In this latter Reformation repertory so, perhaps case, Tomkins was ruminating upon the appropriately, Tomkins’s essay is very long: once normative genre of two-part bicinium his ostinato is stated 55 times, after an which had been used by early-Tudor opening fuga built out of ten statements composers for the first verses of organ of the same melody, 65 in all. Tomkins was hymns. The composer of this setting is in the habit of dating his compositions, unknown but was probably Thomas and he attributed this one to 1637, in Preston, the leading English organist which year fell his 65th birthday.