Early keyboard music

A shadowy figure, apparently not a professional musician but a woodworker like his father, perhaps a harpsichord maker, Giles Farnaby has seemed a minor figure when compared to his most distinguished contemporaries. Yet in the judgment of the compilers of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, his compositions were considered worthy to stand beside their work and comprise about one-sixth of that anthology. Although not a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Farnaby nonetheless contributed sacred vocal pieces to several psalters and in 1598 published his own collection of Canzonets to Fowre Voyces dedicated to a member of Queen Elizabeth's court who may have been his patron.

It is facile to say that Farnaby could not command the technical resources of a Byrd or a Bull, but the real difference between him and such masters seems to be a matter of personality rather than technique. He seldom writes with the majestic dignity and grandeur of Byrd, or the extrovert brilliance of Bull, but his musical language is instead intimate and modest, on a more domestic scale. His writing, like Bull's, is firmly based in the generation of Blitheman, and from him he seems to inherit a certain unlikely wildness, an occasional oddity, caprice and daring, but with a fine judgment of the emotional effects of juxtaposed harmonies and intricate lines moving across the compass of his instrument.

In Farnaby: Complete fantasias for harpsichord (Naxos 8.560025, rec 2005, 59') Glen Wilson presents this music with complete conviction, ranging from a monumental seriousness to graceful tunefulness. He is strikingly successful in incorporating elaborate flourishes and divisions into Farnaby's harmonic and melodic structures—embellishments that neither disturb nor distort. He also produces the most convincing realization of the enigmatic one- and two-stroke ornament signs that I have yet heard, based on Praetorius's table of ornaments in volume 3 of Syntagma musicum. Wilson's respect for this music is reflected in his choice of the complete fantasies for his recital. Following the composer's own occasional practice, he includes his own exemplary settings of Farnaby's canzonet Construe my meaning and the eight-part madrigal Witness ye heavens.

In 1963 Thurston Dart could write of John Bull's fantasies, In Nomines and other plainsong settings, carols, preludes and so on that 'such work may seem music to look at rather than to hear, to admire rather than to love'. From the first note of Siegbert Rampe's recital Bull: Walsingham—organ and keyboard works (Dabringhaus und Grimm MGD 341 1258–2, rec 2004, 81') any suggestion that these genres in Bull's output are intellectually cold or merely academic is instantly dispelled. An initial prelude (Musica Britannica 84) that does indeed look slight on paper leaps from the page like a flash of lightning. Throughout the entire disc there is a sense of barely contained excitement, of a performer revelling in the technical and emotional demands of the music. The principal work of this recital is the Walsingham variations, played here on a wonderful organ by Hans Scherer (c.1580–c.1631) in St Stephanskirche, Tangermünde, Sachsen-Anhalt. One must, however, question the constant stop changes used to emphasize the variety of texture and tone already present in the music. In a reverberant acoustic the very fast tempo, seemingly ideal for the spare textures of the opening of the piece, soon leads to an impressionistic blur in the later virtuoso variations. The same problem arises in the 'Great' In Nomine (MB 28) where the combination of a very rapid tempo and a rich acoustic fatally clouds the rhythmic and contrapuntal complexity of this wondrously eccentric work, one of the most breathtaking pieces in all music, written throughout in 11/4 metre. The instrument used here is the organ of St Andreaskirche, Soest-Ostönnen, which dates from 1586 but contains pipework apparently from about 1425—a most remarkable survival.

One of Siegbert Rampe's greatest strengths is his ability to suggest that such music might have been played extempore. On a 1637 Andreas Ruckers harpsichord, a Dorick Prelude (MB 61) is an excellent example where divisions flow from his fingers as...