Luogo e data di registrazione		Vienna (Austria) - maggio 1954
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Produced by		Seymour Solomon
	Engineer		Franz Plott
	Prima Edizione LP		Vanguard - The Bach Guild | BG-539 | 1 LP - durata 48' 06" | (p) 1954
	Edizione CD		Vanguard Classics | 08 2027 71 | 1 CD - durata 48' 06" | (c) 1994 | ADD
	Cover Art		-
	Note		-

The Elizabethan and Jacobean Age in England was a period of the most intimate relationship between poetry and music. Verse was conceived to be sung and the two arts were never more closely united and interdependent. Whereas in the madrigal, it was often necessary for the composer to compromise because of the polyphony, in the less involved accompanied solo song a real bond between word and tone was achieved. Both these vocal forms enjoyed a brief but rich flowering from the last years of the sixteenth century to about 1630. Frequent literary references to the airs would seem to indicate that they were more widely known than the madrigals. Furthermore, the practise of substituting instruments for voices in the madrigals ("apt for voyces or violls") tended to make the performers more interested in the interplay of the parts than in the poetry - a situation wich provided an incentive for the creation of an indipendent instrumental art. A sizeable body of chamber music thus came into being, in the form of fantasias, In Nomines, and dance pieces for consorts of viols or wind instruments, the like of which was unknown in continental Europe until a century later. The Fantasia and Pavan of John Jenkins (1592-1678) are among the finest examples by a master of this type of compositions. The scores are from a manuscript in the British Museum in London. Thomas Morley's (1557-1603) Air for three viols appears in the author's celebrated treatise, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Praticall Musicke, where it is an illustration of a kind of "song without words". John Dowland's Book of Airs, 1597, was the first of a series of "Airs to the Lute or Viol" published by lutenist composers, most of whom performed and popularized their songs before committing them to print. Entitled, The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of fower parts with Tablature for the Lute; So made that all the parts together, or either of them severally may be sung to the Lute, Orpherian or Viol de gambo, the collection was apparently a concession to the contemporary fondness for part-singing. Each song was printed so that it could be performed either by one person who could sing the tune to his own accompaniments, or by four people who could sit around a table and sing together from one book. With few exceptions, notably the above-mentioned and Dowland's unique addition of a treble viol obbligato for three of his songs in The Pilgrim's Solace, 1612, the books of airs were printed for voice and lute in tablature notation. In the third section of the song Can she excuse my wrongs Dowland uses a popular tune of the day, The Woods so Wild and If my complaints was also know in many instrumental settings as Captain Piper's Galliard. These are from The First Booke of Songes or Ayres. From silent Night, for voice, lute, treble and bass viols, is from A Pilgrim's Solace. Besides his accomplishments as one of the greatest Elizabethan song writers, a distinction he shares with the poet-composer Thomas Campian (1567-1620), Dowland (1562-1626) was the outstanding lute virtuoso of his day. His music for the instrument as well as the numerous other surviving contemporary manuscripts give ample evidence of the highly developed state of this solo literature, the extent and importance of which is only now being investigated. The lute solo, My Lady Hundson's Puffe, exists in manuscript in the British Museum. Lady Hundson was probably the wife of Sir George Carey, the second Baron Hudson to whom Dowland dedicated his First Book of Songes and Ayres. Campian's air, I care not for these ladies, set to his own words, is one of the best of the humorous songs of the time. It is found in Part One of Rosseter's Book of Ayres, 1601. Of all the birds that I do know by John Bartlett (fl. 1606) is from A Booke of Ayres... 1606. Set to a poem by George Gascoigne, it is a skit on the name of his friend Philip Sparrow, the poet. The theme is, feed the sparrow (any small bird in Elizabethan times) and it will do anything to please you. Pandolpho by Robert Parsons (d. 1570) is a song from a stage play, and exists in manuscript in Kings College, Cambridge. Equally impressive in quality and quantity is the remarkable output of Elizabethan and Jacobean keyboard music which, after almost a century of development, was thoroughly sophisticated and completely idiomatic in style and technique. Giles Farnaby (c.1560-c.1600), a name perhaps less familiar than those of Byrd, Bull and Gibbons, was one of the most original and imaginative of the virginalists. ("Virginals" was the English term for the harpsichord in all its shapes and sizes) Like all the writers of this school he utilized simple popular airs or borrowed dance tunes as themes for variations, the form such keyboard music usually assumed. Up Tails All is based on a popular country dance tune, and is one of the most elaborately worked out sets of variations in the literature. It appears in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, which is also the source for Farnaby's harpsichord setting of the Alman by Robert Johnson (1569-1633). Notes by Sydney Beck, Music Division, New York, Public Library Alfred Deller is one of the few contemporary masters of the counter-tenor (pr male alto) voice, for which Bach and Purcell wrote some of their most beatiful music. He is also one of the great interpretive musicuans of modern times. Born at Margate, Kent, in 1912, he made a reputation as a boy soprano and then moved easily into the alto register. A favorite at British music festivals, he has also had a great success on the continent, specializing in the works of Dowland, Purcell, Handel and Bach. Of his art the Manchester Guardian wrote, "His production of this unusual voice, and his technique, are almost flawless, and his phrasing is unsurpassed for imagination and sensibility." The Birmingham Post wrote: "Mr. Deller , whose wondrous voice graced both Purcell and Danyel, is one of the supreme British singers of our generation." Desmond Dupré, who plays the lute on this recording, studied cello at the Royal College of Music. An increasing interest in pre-classical music led him to take up the lute, guitar, viols and cithern. The critic Dyneley Hussey wrote of him, "the versatile Desmond Dupré seems to be master of any bowed or plucked instrument." He has accompanied Alfred Deller in many notable recitals. Gustav Leonhardt is the renowned Dutch harpsichordist, organist, Baroque scholar, who now teaches at the Vienna Academy. The Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble which he directs is made up of outstanding Viennese musicians dedicated to the study of Renaissance and Baroque music. In the Consort of viol from this ensemble, Leonhardt himself plays bass viol, as does Nicholas Harnoncourt. The treble viols are Eduard Melkus and Alice Hoffelner.