Luogo e data di registrazione		Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg (Germania) - 1-4 luglio 1974
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Johann-Nikolaus Matthes
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 063-30 120 - (1 lp) - durata 52' 26" - (p) 1974 - Analogico
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26489 2 - (1 cd) - durata 52' 26" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

William Byrd (1543-1623) In a Golden Age true gold becomes devalued. As plants in very fertile soil spread out and rob each other of the sun, so contemporary artists of real greatness tend to some extent to mask each other's achievements. Haydn would undoubtedly have shone brighter in the Vienna of 1750 then he could forty years later beside the very different accomplishments of Mozart and Beethoven, and William Byrd has also paid the penalty of living at a time of excessive supply, that amazing age we call Elizabethan, although it stretched well into the reign of her successor, James I. For us, Byrd is a great pioneer, a towering bridge between post-Reformation polyphony and the newer, more keenly harmonic, visions of the seventeenth century, but we name him in the same breath as his fellow writers for voices, viols and virginals, all of them younger and not one his equal in expressive power, versatility or sheer musical invention. It is a mistake these younger men themselves did not make. For them, Byrd was in no sense primus inter pares: they called him, rather, Brittanfcae Musicae Parens, “a man never without reverence to be named of the musicians”, and claimed that “in Europe is none like to our English man: with fingers and with pen he hath not now his peer". To discount Lassus is bold - Monteverdi was little known in England in 1591 -, but who at home could have sustained a challenge against Byrd’s supremacy? Dowland, Morley, Bull, Farnaby, Weelkes, Ferrabosco, Campion, Gibbons, Tomkins - the names are inexhaustible and glorious, taken together, byt all except Morley and Gibbons excelled in one particular skill, whether it was lute-song, consort music, madrigal, church settings or keyboard writing, and lack the overall range of confident mastery that we find in Byrd. He is the vhole man, praised for his learning and for his performance, respected for his lifelong refusal to abandon his Catholic faith, and loved for his upright character and for his generous attitude to his colleagues and friends. Some such appreciation of Byrd’s value as a human being must lie behind the eulogy that Henry Peacham wrote in The Compleat Gentleman in 1622, the last full year of Byrd’s life, when he had outlived many of his pupils and become a revered national figure: “For Motetts and Musicke of pietie and devotion as well for the honour of our Nation, as the merit of the man, I prefer above all our Phoenix M. William Byrd, whom in that kind I know not whether any may equall". Byrd’s masses, motets and liturgical settings represent by far the largest part of his output, and a critic could not have passed them by in silence for their very number, even if it were not obvious that for Byrd, as for Bach, the worship of God was the kernel of his existence. Yet, a little later on, Peacham does justice also to Byrd’s secular vocal writing: “being of him selfe naturally disposed to Gravitie and Pietie, his veine is not so much for light Madrigals or Canzonets, yet his Virginella and some others in his first Set cannot be mended [i.e. bettered] by the best Italian of them all". In fact, the three published volumes of 1588, 1589 and 1611 contain some of the best of all English madrigals, and the fifty or so unpublished songs for solo voice and viol accompaniment are both beautiful and innovatory. Words, whether sacred or profane, were always Byrd’s most central concern, and his admirers responded with relish to his response. In the preface to the 1605 Gradualia Byrd himself reveals something of the creative process: “Moreover, in these words, as I have learned by trial, there is such a profound and hidden power that to one thinking upon things divine and diligently and earnestly pondering them, all the fittest numbers occur as il of themselves and freely offer themselves to the mind which is not indolent or inert". Byrd was appointed organist of Lincoln Cathedral in 1563, and from 1570 until the end of his life served as one of the organists of the Chapel Royal. in both posts he must have trained choristers, in addition to supplying sung music tor the services, so his deep interest in the human voice should not surprise us, nor should we forget that it lies at the root of his instrumental music as well. There are no direct transcriptions of chansons or motets among Byrd’s keyboard works; such lifeless copying would have offended his acute sense of instrumental idiom. But every moving part in one of his fantasies or pavans is a wordless voice, having different registers and needing breath. Equal in importance with words to Byrd was form. After a few early organ pieces, probably influenced by the work of his teacher, Thomas Tallis, Byrd abandoned cantus firmus writing, the traditional means of constructing abstract music on a large scale, and developed such forms as the sectional fantasy, the folksong variation and, above all, the ground. Apart from the great sets on the passamezzo antico (Passing mesures) and the passamezzo moderno (Quadran - in G major, with B natural or “quadro”), Byrd rarely used the common European grounds (Folia, Be di Spagna, Ruggiero), preferring either his own invention or formulae such as the one attributed to Hugh Aston. For shorter pieces Byrd adapted the sort of dances (notably the pavan and galliard pair) that were written for viol consort and are already found worked out for keyboard in sources such as the Mulliner Book and the Dublin Virginal MS. “Lachrymae” is a keyboard elaboration of the famous song by John Dowland, first printed by William Barley in 1596; here, as in almost everything he wrote, Byrd’s lyrical feeling, restraint and delicacy of taste stamp his work as quite exceptional and beyond comparison with any other artist of the age, at least in EngIand. William Byrd, "homo memorabilis". The concept “English Virginal Music” not only obscures the flavour of the various composers it embraces (Byrd especially), but also gives rise to confusion about the instrument the music was played on. Surviving English virginals proper date only from the midseventeenth century, but the word “virginal” seems to have meant any keyboard instrument except the organ, and Byrd and his contemporaries must have used a wide range of Italian and Flemish imports: harpsichords, claviorgana, oblong and polygonal virginals and spinets, perhaps even clavichords. Colin Tilney About the Instruments In the second half ot the 16th and the first half ot the 17th century the art of music composed for domestic keyboard instruments rose to its climax in England. Those numerous English composers that wrote works tor these instruments are all knovvn under the name of virginalists. Up to about 1660 any type of harpsichord - harpsichord proper, clavicytherium, virginal or spinet - was called virginal. Only from about 1660 onwards was the term harpsichord used, the term virgfna/ being limited to virginal and spinet. Thus these virginalists are composers that composed for the harpsiohord. At the time ot the virginalists there must have been a great number of harpsichords to perfom these works. The tact is that the inventory of instruments owned by King Henry VIII, who had a great gift for music, contains an amazingly large number of keyboard instruments. Queen Elizabeth as well has played the virginal. But this does not imply that all these harpsichords favoured as they were have been of English origin. In the 16th century, it is true, there are known the names of 16 harpsichord makers in England, but at least some ot them give the impression that their bearers immigrated to England. In the Victoria & Albert Museum there is a harpsichord dating from the year 1579, made in London by a local harpsichord maker, whose name was Lodewijk Theeuwes and who was of Flemish descent. In this museum there is also a spinet that is said to have been in the possession of Queen Elizabeth I. It is beyond all doubt a Italian instrument. The oldest hapsichord preserved of definite English origin dates from 1622. Without doubt the English virginal-players did not only use autochthonous instruments, but also imported them from Italy and Flanders. Thus history gives reason for the fact that an English and an Flemish keyboard instrument have been used for this recording. The Italian instrument is an unsigned and undated harpsichord which on account of certain characteristics suggests the probability that it was made in the mid-17th century. Apart from two devices to vary the timbre - which, by the way, are not used in this recording - the instrument is exceptionally conservative, so that one may suppose its sound to be most similar to that of the instruments that were used in Byrd’s lifetime. The Flemish instrument comes from the workshop of Martinus van der Biest and was made in 1580. It is an instrument that is called virginal according to the German terminology. In such an instrument the strings lie horizontally, but parallel to the keyboard. Contrary to the wing-shaped spinet the virginal is oblong and rectangular in shape. The harpsichord used here is not the usual type, but a double-virginal. With the Antwerp speciality the keys are on one (here the lett) side, whereas the key-free side (here on the right) can hold an octave-virginal. This ottavino may also be placed on the big instrument and both are coupled, so that the pitch on the keyboard below is 8-foot/4-foot. Two works ot this recording are performed on the double-virginal in this way: Galliard in D minor (Side 1) and Coranto in C major (Side 2). The instruments used here form part of the collection of old instruments in the German National Museum, Nuremberg. The Italian harpsichord is owned by Dr. Dr. h. c. Ulrich Rück and forms part of his collection of historical instruments. In this recording both instruments are mean-tone tuned. John Henry van der Meer Translation by Gudrun Meier
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"