Gibbons: Music for Viols, Volume 2 – Concordia

Six viols playing in tune with one another is one of the rarer pleasures music affords, and rarer still is the ensemble that can make the sound breathe as if it came from a single set of lungs. Concordia manages this on the second volume of its Gibbons project, and manages it with a kind of understated authority that never calls attention to itself — which is exactly right for this repertoire.

Orlando Gibbons died young, not yet forty, felled by what was probably a stroke at Canterbury while awaiting the arrival of King Charles I’s Spanish bride. He left behind a body of work slender in quantity but staggering in its concentration — music that seems to compress a lifetime’s thought into a few well-chosen lines of counterpoint. The six-part fantasias that open this disc are a case in point. Listen to the sheer weight of sonority Concordia draws from six bowed instruments moving in close imitation — the sound has a burnished, autumnal quality, dark at the bottom, silvery at the top, with none of the astringency you sometimes get from period viol consorts trying too hard to sound “authentic.” Reiko Ichise and Mark Levy on trebles keep an admirably light touch even in the thickest textures, letting the inner parts — Joanna Levine, Emilia Benjamin — come through with real clarity.

The two-part fantasias are the real discovery here, though, or ought to be for listeners who don’t know this repertoire well. Two-part writing exposes everything. There’s nowhere to hide a weak line, no cushion of inner voices to smooth over an awkward turn of phrase. Gibbons treats the form as a genuine dialogue — two equal minds arguing, agreeing, finishing each other’s sentences — and the performances by whichever pairing takes each track (the album doesn’t always make plain who plays what, an annoyance) have an improvisatory freshness that never feels undernourished. This is chamber music in the truest sense, centuries before the term existed.

Then there are the songs. Rachel Elliott’s soprano enters “What Is Our Life?” like cool water — no vibrato to speak of, a straight, plangent tone that suits Gibbons’s peculiar melancholy far better than anything more operatic would. “The Silver Swan” is the famous one, five bars of a swan singing only once, before death, and Elliott doesn’t oversell it. She lets the poem’s chill sit there, unadorned. Comparisons to Dowland are inevitable and not wrong, but Gibbons’s melancholy has a different color — less self-dramatizing, more austere, closer to the pure geometry of his keyboard writing in Parthenia than to the theatrical sighing of the lutenist songbooks. “Ah, Dear Heart” achieves something genuinely strange: intimacy without warmth, tenderness held at arm’s length.

Gary Cooper’s chamber organ, used sparingly, adds a faint reediness under the voice in the consort songs without ever crowding the viols — a wise choice, since Gibbons’s lines need room to breathe.

If I have a complaint, it’s a small one: the six-part pavan and galliard, gorgeous as they are, could use another degree of rhythmic snap. Concordia’s default mode is a kind of velvety legato, beautifully blended but occasionally short on dance energy — you want a little more hip in the galliard, a little more lift. Fretwork, in its Gibbons recordings from some years back, brought a touch more rhythmic bite to comparable material; Phantasm’s viol playing elsewhere has a sharper edge too. Concordia trades some of that electricity for warmth and unanimity of tone, and mostly the trade pays off.

The album, made in a Gloucestershire parish church, gives the ensemble a warm, close acoustic — you can hear bow changes, the faint scrape of gut string, the room’s natural resonance filling in around the chords without smearing the counterpoint. Whoever balanced this session understood the music.

Taken as a whole, this disc confirms what specialists have long argued and general listeners rarely get the chance to hear for themselves: that Gibbons, working in a form already old-fashioned by the 1620s, wrote consort music of a searching inwardness that has no real precedent and not many successors. Byrd is grander. Dowland is more overtly seductive. Gibbons is stranger, sparer, and — on the evidence of this recording — more quietly inexhaustible than either. Get this disc. Get the first volume too, if you haven’t already. Music this good does not come along in every century.