Well performed, well referenced and with lyrics. Worthy of purchase.
- The Deller Consort
-
Tavern Songs: Catches, Glees and Other Diverse Entertainments of Merrie
England
- Man Is For The Woman Made Time: 1:09
- Sir Walter Time: 1:30
- To Thee And To The Maid Time: 1:24
- Chiding Catch ("Fie, Nay") Time: 1:15
- Once, Twice, Thrice Time: 2:17
- When The Cock Begins To Crow Time: 2:19
- An Epitaph ("Under The Stone") Time: 1:41
- 'Twas You, Sir Time: 1:17
- Had She Not Care Enough Time: 1:05
- Young Anthony Time: 1:24
- Amo, Amas, I Love A Lass Time: 1:32
- Ah, Robin Time: 2:02
- Bess Black Time: 2:11
- I Am Athirst Time: 0:39
- Wine Does Wonders Time: 2:09
- Hoyda, Jolly Rutterkin Time: 2:01
- An Ape, A Lion, A Fox And An Ass Time: 1:18
- Troll The Bowl Time: 1:10
- Fair And Ugly, False And True Time: 2:09
- We Be Soldiers Three Time: 1:30
- Lure, Falconers, Lure Time: 1:23
- Sing Fair Clorinda Time: 2:52
- In The Merry Month Of May Time: 1:30
- True Englishmen Time: 1:22
- L'ape E La Serpe Time: 3:20
-
Tavern Songs: Catches, Glees and Other Diverse Entertainments of Merrie
England
The Deller Consort: Alfred Deller,
counter-tenor, Gerald English, tenor, Wilfred Brown, tenor and
Maurice Bevan, baritone.
THE CATCHES and GLEES on this record not only afford a view of "pre- Victorian" popular composed music in England, in which three or four voices join to sing convivial song. Many are definitely "pre-Victorian" in the verses. "Come sing me a bawdy song" said Shakespeare's Falstaff, as he entered the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. This was typical of the boisterous love of life in Elizabethan times, with its uncensored frank view of every side of human existence. Its highest expression came in Shakespeare's plays, where "low" comedy helped highlight the deepest tragedy, and where the banter between men and women indicated that neither had much to learn about the facts of. life.
Then came the Puritan attack upon such "frivolities" in song and play. With the short-lived Stuart Restoration, described as "dissolute" in most histories, the lid was lifted again. Charles II, who came to the throne in 1660, not only imported French music but was fond of "a very merry play." Dryden complained bitterly that a poet to make his way had to write comedies. And comedies amply licentious, and brilliantly witty, were supplied to the Restoration age by Congreve, Wycherly and Vanbrugh. A passage in John Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife indicates the spirit both of this kind of drama and of many of the songs on this record: Lord Rake: I'll sing you a song I made this morning . . ." Colonel Bully: 'Tis wicked, I hope.
But there was a realistic side to this frivolity and wit. The gentry, coming to the playhouse, saw themselves mirrored, their frailties underlined and laughed at. This is clearly put in a passage from William Wycherly's The Country Wife:
Sparkish: Damn the poets! . . . They'll put a man in a play for looking asquint. Their predecessors were contented to make serving-men only their stage fools: but these rogues must have gentlemen, with a pox to 'em, nay, knights; and indeed, you shall hardly see a fool on the stage but he's a knight.
It is this Restoration spirit that is mirrored in about half the songs on this record. The remainder put them in a context starting with the age of Henry VIII and ending with the reign of George III.
The forms of Catch and Glee are inextricably mixed in origin with part songs, rounds and madrigals. A Catch however meant specifically a round for three or more voices, written only in a single voice part, so that each succeeding singer, upon his entry with the melody, had to "catch" his part at the proper time. With the passage of years, to quote Groves, "words were selected so constructed that it was possible,
either by mispronunciation or by the interweaving of words and phrases given to the different voices, to produce the most ludicrous and comical effects. The singing of catches became an art." Glee is a looser term, coming from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "music". In the 18th century it came to mean a song of massed harmony in contrast to the polyphonic Catch. In printed music, the Catch appears as early as 1609, in a collection of "Pleasant Roundelayes and delightful Catches." The Restoration saw a flood of such books, one of the most popular being Thomas d'Urfey's "Wit and Mirth; or Pills to Purge Melancholy," which grew from one volume in 1682 to six volumes in 1720. As. for the singers, in 1741 a Madrigal Society was founded, of whose members Sir John Hawkins wrote, "most of them were mechanics, some weavers from Spitalfields, others of various trades and occupations who were all versed in the practice of Psalmody." They became highly skilled in English and Italian madrigal. The Catch Club, in which "noblemen and gentlemen" came together to sing catches, canons and glees, started in 1761, with the Prince of Wales (later George IV) becoming a member in 1786. The first Glee Club, with a middle-class membership, was established in 1787.
Henry Purcell (c. 1659-1695) was the greatest composer to write such English convivial songs and catches, and nine of his are presented on this record. The earliest composer represented is William Cornshye (c. 1465-1523), who was for a time a favorite of King Henry VIII, but also spent some years in jail for writing satirical songs. His touching "Ah, Robin" and Falstaffian "Hoyda, jolly rutterkin" are among the first masterpieces of English composed popular song. The anonymous "We be soldiers three" proves that the soldiers who returned from the Elizabethan Flemish wars were kin in spirit to the soldiers of World War I who sang "Mademoiselle from Armentieres." John Bennet's "Lure, falconers, lure!" is a beautiful pictorial madrigal with its soaring "flight" image at the close. Henry Lawes was immortalized in a Milton sonnet. "In the merry month of May" exhibits the French influence on Restoration song. With Reginald Spofforth's lovely part song, to an Italian text, we know we are in the age of Mozart.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE
Catches and Glees are the most delightful of listening, but as Groves' Dictionary puts it, "the skill with which they were sung has become a tradition, and certainly many old specimens are so difficult that they must have required considerable labor and practice to sing them perfectly." In Alfred Deller and the distinguished group of singers he has brought together as the Deller Consort, the Golden Age of English music has found its foremost interpreters. The laughter, delicate wit and sweet tenderness of this great vocal music are recreated with haunting beauty of tone, perfection of style, and polished ensemble. Of the Deller Consort's singing of English madrigals, BG-553, Ross Parmenter reported in the New York Times, "Beyond question this first volume contains the loveliest madrigal singers this listener has ever heard on records." Of Alfred Deller's recording of English folk songs, The Three Ravens, VRS-479, Harold Lawrence wrote in the Saturday Review, "The recital is an unqualified triumph. Deller's phrasing glides above the plucked strings like a gull in flight, his intonation is ravishingly pure, and his voice is as cool as a mountain lake and at the same time possessed of warm and exciting undercurrents." Alfred Deller and the Deller Consort are exclusive Vanguard-Bach Guild recording artists. Among their outstanding records are the following: THE THREE RAVENS: Songs of Folk and Minstrelsy out of Elizabethan England.
Alfred Deller, with Desmond Dupre, lute........................................................VRS-479
THE WRAGGLE TAGGLE GYPSIES: Folk Songs and
Ballads, with Desmond
Dupre, lute and guitar, and Consort of
Recorders ......................................... VRS-1001
THE ENGLISH MADRIGAL SCHOOL, Vol. 1. The Deller Consort ........... BG-553
THE ENGLISH MADRIGAL SCHOOL, Vol. 2. The Deller Consort ........... BG-554
THE HOLLY AND THE IVY: 23 Carols of Old England,
with Alfred Deller solo,
the Deller Consort, lute and
recorders ............................................................ VRS-499
THE CRIES OF LONDON: Alfred Deller, the Deller
Consort, and London Chamber
Players ............................................................................................................ BG-556
This is a Vanguard Quality Control recording, utilizing Ampex Model 300 magnetic tape recorders, Altec and Siemens AKG C-U condenser microphones, and Mcintosh amplifiers to produce the original masters, which embody a frequency response covering the entire range of human hearing and embrace the full gamut of vocal sonorites. Supervision was by Seymour Solomon, Music Director of Vanguard Recording Society, Inc.
VANGUARD RECORDING SOCIETY, INC.. NEW YORK