Credits:

Music & Mars

Description:

Thorough historical reproduction of various gambas and strings. A group of talented musicians enter the world of important manuscripts of the English Renaissance! Led by two experienced gamba players, Jane Actman and Irene Klein, the ancient instruments group Music & Mars has been carefully producing thematic albums on various labels. Recently, they have been producing discs on the Ramee label, and this album is a selection of their best-known chamber music from the English Renaissance and Baroque periods. The theme of this album is the "Baldwin Commonplace Book (Baldwin Manuscript)," a manuscript transcribed between 1586 and 1591 by John Baldwin, who was a singer in the English royal household. This important manuscript vividly illustrates the diversity of music enjoyed by Elizabethan English intellectuals, from 15th-century polyphonic pieces that retain traces of medieval music to 16th-century Italian madrigals. Music & Mars has selected a well-balanced selection of both sacred and secular works, and has composed a program that is both elegant and rich in flavor, featuring a gamba ensemble and singers in the style of the day. The natural delicacy of the engineering of recording engineer Rainer Arndt, the label's president and a baroque violinist, shines through in a series of moments of astonishingly precise sound production in the gamba ensembles.With the sound of reproduced instruments modeled after English gambas from around 1580 and precious original instruments from the early 17th century, this is a piece of music from days gone by brought back to life with its full flavor. Naxos Japan