Robert Dow died at thirty-five, which seems unbearably young until you consider what he accomplished before consumption or plague or whatever it was took him. Starting around 1581, this Oxford-trained lawyer and passionate amateur player set himself the task of copying out, by hand, an enormous quantity of music — Latin motets, English sacred pieces, consort songs, instrumental fancies — into five partbooks that survive today at Christ Church. The penmanship alone would shame most professional scribes. A detail reproduced in this disc’s booklet, from Dow’s copy of Parson’s Ave Maria, looks less like a working musician’s reference tool than an illuminated manuscript. The man wasn’t preserving music. He was celebrating it.
That distinction matters enormously for how we hear what the Marian Consort and the Rose Consort of Viols have done here.
Rory McCleery, who directs the Marian Consort and co-authored the booklet notes with John Bryan of the Rose Consort, makes a persuasive case that Dow compiled these partbooks not for posterity but for Tuesday evenings — for himself and his friends to gather around a table and make music together for the sheer pleasure of it. This was how Elizabethan musical life actually worked, in the great houses and the Inns of Court, in the candlelit rooms where gentlemen who could read a part were welcome guests. Thinking about the hours Dow spent copying so that his circle might sing and play — in an age when you couldn’t stream a Tallis motet before breakfast — is genuinely humbling.
The repertoire is rich, and shrewdly chosen.
Nine purely instrumental pieces fall to the Rose Consort alone, with five more serving as viol accompaniments to solo songs. I’ll admit viol consort music has never quite seized me the way the lute does, or the keyboard fantasia — there’s something about the sound that can feel simultaneously plush and remote, as if heard through tapestry. But what the Rose Consort produces here is something else. Their blend is extraordinarily fine, the inner voices alive and independent rather than merely filling harmonic space, and their rhythmic sense in the dances has a natural, unforced lilt that avoids the metronomic tidiness that plagues lesser early-music ensembles.
The Marian Consort’s singers are another matter entirely — and I mean that as the highest praise. McCleery has assembled a group of exceptional young voices, and the ensemble singing is distinguished above all by its transparency: you can hear every line, follow every imitation, track a cantus firmus as it moves through the texture. In polyphony this complex — Byrd, Tallis, and their continental contemporaries are all represented — that kind of clarity is not a given. It requires discipline, intonation of almost unnatural steadiness, and a willingness to subordinate individual timbre to collective sound. These singers have all three.
What makes this disc more than a scholarly exercise — and it might easily have been merely that — is the sense of occasion the performers bring to even the smallest piece. There is warmth here, the feeling of music being made because someone genuinely loves it. Which is, of course, exactly what Dow intended.
Decisive verdict: this is exceptional work, beautifully documented and more vividly performed than most early-music releases of recent seasons. Buy it.
