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This year marks the 400th anniversary of Orlando Gibbons’s death. Straddling the Renaissance and the Baroque, Gibbons flourished at the court of King James I and is loved today for his madrigal The Silver Swan, though that is only the high point of his varied output of choral music.
One admirer is the American composer Nico Muhly. In 2012, he composed My Days, a work for four voices and viol consort. The premiere was given by the Hilliard Ensemble and Fretwork, whose recordings Muhly says have informed much of his musical development.
My Days is described as “a ritualised memory piece about Orlando Gibbons” and this recording appropriately envelops Muhly’s piece with a selection of Gibbons’s chamber music for strings, played here on viols, and the contrasting styles speak in a common language across the centuries.
It would be hard to imagine a more prestigious quartet of singers in My Days than Iestyn Davies, Samuel Boden, Hugo Hymas and Jimmy Holliday. They put a halo of radiance around their intoning of the psalm at the heart of the text. Alongside, Muhly uses an extract from Gibbons’s autopsy, where a multitude of voices seem to be overheard from centuries past. The whole is a fascinating blend of ancient and modern.
The selection of works by Gibbons focuses on his half dozen Fantasias for six viols, miniatures that offer a bewildering wealth of ideas with an unexpected harmony or change of direction around every corner. The disc ends with the verse anthem “Behold, thou hast made my days”, a glowing conclusion.
★★★★☆
‘My Days’ is released by Signum Classics
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