Gibbons: Fantazias for Viols – Concordia

Some music asks to be admired from a respectful distance. Gibbons’s viol fantasies ask something else — they ask you to lean in, to stop breathing for a moment, to let the suspensions do their slow work. Concordia understands this. You can hear it in the way they handle silence as carefully as sound.

Gibbons died young, not quite forty-two, felled by what was probably a stroke while attending the royal court at Canterbury in 1625. He had gone there to help welcome Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s new French bride, and never came home. He left behind a relatively slender catalog compared with Byrd or Bull. Density of thought, not bulk, was always his currency.

The nine three-part fantazias from the 1621 London print form the emotional spine of this disc. Concordia plays them as a connected sequence rather than scattering them among the larger-scored works, and the decision pays off. The notes cite a scholarly argument that these nine pieces circle around a shared but never-quite-stated melodic idea, a kind of ghost theme. Whether or not you buy the theory outright, the rendition makes the case sound plausible. Themes surface, submerge, return transformed. The ear starts hunting for connections almost against its will.

Sonically, the group achieves something genuinely difficult: five gambas — trebles, tenors, basses — plus Gary Cooper’s discreetly threaded harpsichord, and yet the blend reads as a single breathing organism rather than five competing timbres. A string quartet thrives on argument, on four personalities in productive tension. A viol consort wants the opposite: anonymity in service of unity, individual bow arms disappearing into a collective murmur. Concordia’s intonation is remarkably clean given how exposed these lines are. There’s nowhere to hide in an In Nomine.

The three In Nomine a5 settings that open the program are stern, almost liturgical in feel. Gibbons is working within the constraints of a cantus firmus derived, as English composers had done since Taverner, from the “Gloria tibi Trinitas” plainchant, filtered here through decades of accumulated tradition. Concordia takes them broadly, without rushing toward cadences, and the effect is properly monumental. Compare this with Fretwork’s more famous survey from the 1990s, leaner and occasionally quicker off the mark, and you find Concordia opting for weight and grain over agility. I don’t think either approach is definitively right. But there’s an unhurried gravity to this reading that suits the material.

The four- and three-part fantazias “with the Great Dooble Base” bring a different color altogether. The great bass viol growls beneath the texture like something surfacing from a lake bottom, and Joanna Levine handles the instrument’s notorious unwieldiness with real assurance. The single Galliard and the Pavan De Le Roye offer momentary relief, dance rhythms poking through the contrapuntal fog, though even here Gibbons can’t resist a melancholy turn of phrase.

Recorded in a Gloucestershire parish church, the sound has bloom without murk. You get the resonance without losing the inner voices, which is no small feat given how these pieces are built from overlapping imitative entries that need to be heard, not just felt. Toddington’s stone walls give everything a faint silvery halo.

Is this an indispensable disc? For anyone curious about the roots of English chamber music, the world before the string quartet existed, when consorts of viols carried the weight of serious instrumental thought, yes, unreservedly. Gibbons doesn’t have the international name recognition of Byrd, and he’ll never fill a hall the way Purcell does. But this is music of real depth, played by musicians who clearly believe in it, and that belief is contagious. I finished the disc wanting the second volume immediately. That, from a critic who has sat through altogether too many viol consort recordings that mistake reverence for insight, counts as high praise.