My Days: Orlando Gibbons and Nico Muhly album evaluation – a luminous tribute

The 400th anniversary of the dying of Orlando Gibbons has thus far been one of the crucial much less prominently marked of this 12 months’s important musical dates. Gibbons, who used to be born in Oxford in 1583, used to be one of the crucial remaining important English madrigalists, and is regularly seen as a transitional determine between Renaissance track and the baroque, despite the fact that traditionally he has been overshadowed via the extra prolific William Byrd, with whom he can have studied.

As neatly as vocal works, Gibbons wrote a wealth of string chamber track, and Fretwork’s variety comprises Fantasias in two, 3, 4, 5 and 6 portions, in addition to a Pavan and Galliard for 6 viols. Placed on the centre of the collection is Nico Muhly’s My Days, at first commissioned for Fretwork and the Hilliard Ensemble; it’s a surroundings for 4 male voices and viols of Psalm 39, with an extract from a document at the post-mortem that used to be carried out on Gibbons; Muhly describes the end result as “a ritualised memory piece about Orlando Gibbons”.

Muhly’s composition, with its pressing string figures, contrasts superbly with the flowing imitations of Gibbons’ fantasias, round it. Its vocal traces are constructed out of a unmarried falling melodic determine, with the quartet of counter tenor, two tenors and baritone transferring in luminous rhythmic unison throughout the psalm, earlier than the post-mortem is delivered as a chain of Gibbons-like responses, till a last segment with the voices surrounded via plucked strings earlier than settling at the phrases “my days”, with the viols fluttering round them. It units off the string items round it, completely.

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