Thomas TOMKINS (1572 – 1656)
1. Barafostus’ dream
2. Pavan of three parts
3. GaIliard of three parts
4. Miserere
5. A sad pavan for these, distracted times
6. Worcester brawls (Worster Braules)
7. What if a day
8. Fancy for two to play
9. Fancy
10. Pavan
11. The Lady Folliott’s galliard
12. Fancy
13. Toy made at Poole Court
14. Pavan Earl Strafford
15. Galliard Earl Strafford
16. Fortune my Foe
17. Ground
18. In Nomine
19. Ground
Carole Cerasi (harpsichord)
Rec: December 2000, East Woodhay.
METRONOME MET CD 1049 [73.33]
Tomkins in Solitude: Carole Cerasi’s Harpsichord Portrait
The keyboard music of Thomas Tomkins arrives to us like a dispatch from a vanished England—royalist, Anglican, bereft. Carole Cerasi’s survey on Metronome, recorded in the waning days of 2000, offers nineteen pieces that span the composer’s long career, from the Elizabethan glitter of “Barafostus’ Dream” to the Charles I twilight of “A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times.” It’s a generous program, over seventy minutes, and Cerasi proves an eloquent if occasionally earthbound guide.
Tomkins occupies an odd position in our historical imagination. We know him primarily through his vocal music—those magnificent Services and anthems that represent the last flowering of the English polyphonic tradition before Puritanism temporarily extinguished it. His keyboard works, preserved in manuscripts now scattered between the Bodleian and the Fitzwilliam, reveal a more private sensibility. These are pieces for contemplation rather than display, though they contain their share of virtuosic challenges.
Cerasi plays a French double-manual harpsichord by Andrew Garlick, after Blanchet. The choice matters. The instrument’s silvery, rather dry sonority—characteristic of French work—doesn’t always ideally serve this repertoire. One longs occasionally for the more robust fundamental of an English virginals, particularly in the dance movements where Tomkins’s rhythmic vitality needs grounding. But Cerasi understands the instrument’s strengths, and in the more introspective pieces—the two Grounds, the haunting In Nomine—she draws out a pearly clarity that illuminates the composer’s contrapuntal ingenuity.
The opening “Barafostus’ Dream” receives a reading both fleet and precise. Cerasi articulates the rapid passagework with admirable clarity, though I wish she’d allowed herself more rhetorical freedom in the slower sections. This is dream music, after all—it should wander, hesitate, surprise. The three-part Pavan and Galliard that follow reveal her strength in the more structured forms. She understands that these dances, however stylized, retain their corporeal origins; there’s weight in her left hand, a sense of feet touching ground.
“A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times“—composed, we believe, around 1649 when the world Tomkins knew was literally falling apart—demands more than technical accomplishment. It requires a capacity for desolation. Cerasi plays it beautifully, with considerable sensitivity to its harmonic shadows and melodic sighs, but something holds back. Perhaps it’s the instrument’s bright disposition, perhaps a temperamental reticence. The piece needs to sound almost unbearable, and it doesn’t quite get there.
The Fancies show Tomkins at his most intellectually ambitious, working out contrapuntal ideas with a rigor that anticipates—well, no, let’s be honest, doesn’t quite anticipate Bach, but certainly suggests what the English tradition might have become had history taken a different turn. Cerasi navigates these complex structures with admirable lucidity. You can hear every strand of the polyphonic web. The “Fancy for Two to Play” particularly benefits from her transparent voicing, each line singing out distinctly even on a solo instrument.
Among the named pieces, “The Lady Folliott’s Galliard” emerges as a particular delight—Cerasi catches its aristocratic poise without stiffness, and there’s genuine wit in her handling of the ornamentation. The “Worcester Brawls” (Tomkins’s own city, where he served as organist at the Cathedral) bubbles along with infectious energy, though again I found myself wishing for a bit more abandon, a willingness to roughen the polished surface.
The two Grounds reveal what this collaboration achieves at its best. These variation sets—one in C, one in G—allow Cerasi to display both architectural understanding and decorative imagination. She builds each set carefully, varying articulation and registration to mark the structural divisions while maintaining an inexorable forward drive. The ornamentation, always tasteful, never feels applied from outside but grows organically from the melodic material. This is mature, thoughtful playing.
“Fortune My Foe,” that ubiquitous tune that every English composer from Byrd to Purcell felt compelled to set, receives a interpretation of genuine pathos. Cerasi resists the temptation to over-characterize, letting Tomkins’s increasingly elaborate divisions speak for themselves. By the final variation, with its rushing semiquavers, we’ve traveled a considerable emotional distance.
The Earl Strafford Pavan and Galliard—commemorating Charles I’s ill-fated minister, executed in 1641—carry obvious political freight. Cerasi plays them with appropriate gravity, though I wonder if she doesn’t sometimes mistake solemnity for depth. These pieces were written in anger and grief; they should burn more fiercely.
Technical standards throughout remain high. Cerasi’s finger work is clean, her sense of line secure, her registration choices generally apt if occasionally predictable. The recorded sound from East Woodhay captures the harpsichord’s bloom without exaggerating its mechanical clatter—no mean feat with these instruments.
Yet something nags. This is accomplished, scholarly, respectful playing, but it rarely transcends those virtues to achieve genuine revelation. Tomkins’s best keyboard music contains an emotional directness that can still pierce across four centuries. Cerasi honors the notes but doesn’t always liberate their spirit.
For those exploring this repertoire, the disc offers substantial value—a well-chosen program, reliably executed, intelligently annotated. As a reference album it succeeds admirably. But Tomkins, that melancholy survivor of a murdered culture, deserves playing that risks more, that embraces the music’s darkness and occasional wildness. Cerasi gives us the composer in his Sunday clothes. I wanted to hear him disheveled, desperate, fully human.
