US TARIFFS UPDATE | August 2025 | No impact expected on your Presto orders | Read full details
Lawes: Complete Music for Solo Lyra Viol
Richard Boothby (viola da gamba)
Awards:
-
Gramophone Magazine, July 2016, Editor's Choice
Lawes’s music is in general jolly and introspective by turns. Boothby plays in a charmingly gentle, often elegant yet spare way that suggests he is enjoying a private pleasure which we are nonetheless...
Lawes: Complete Music for Solo Lyra Viol
Richard Boothby (viola da gamba)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Gramophone Magazine, July 2016, Editor's Choice
Lawes’s music is in general jolly and introspective by turns. Boothby plays in a charmingly gentle, often elegant yet spare way that suggests he is enjoying a private pleasure which we are nonetheless...
About
Some of the most famous English composers of the 17th century wrote pieces for the lyra viol, or even entire anthologies. These composers include John Cooper, John Jenkins, Christopher Simpson, Charles Coleman, and William Lawes. Due to the number of strings and their rather flat layout, the lyra viol can approximate polyphonic textures, and because of its small size and large range, it is more suited to intricate and quick melodic lines than the larger types of bass viol.
Employed as “musician in ordinary for lutes and voices” at the court of Charles I, English composer Lawes (1602-1645) is most admired today for his sublime suites for viol consort. His less familiar solo repertoire for lyra-viol is performed here by Richard Boothby, a founder member of Fretwork, on the best preserved instrument of the period (Richard Meares, c. 1647-1725) which is now part of the Kessler Collection in the museum of the Royal College of Music, London.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
-
Gramophone MagazineJuly 2016Editor's Choice
July 2016
Lawes’s music is in general jolly and introspective by turns. Boothby plays in a charmingly gentle, often elegant yet spare way that suggests he is enjoying a private pleasure which we are nonetheless invited to savour…the delicacy with which Boothby phrases and ornaments the music is sublime
Boothby’s handling of them on bass viol is supple and genial if a little careful and reverent: all except one of the 34 pieces on the disc are dances, but he makes them sound more like gentle meditations. It is a sumptuous album - but don’t be fooled by the dancing shoes on the cover.
22nd July 2016
Boothby is an experienced guide to the tonally plaintive, sonically intimate world of the viol, and he mines the varied moods of the pieces here with great success.
Classical Ear 21st July 2016
Clearly, Lawes knew how to elicit the greatest range of moods from this unpredictable instrument; and, equally clearly, Boothby handles both Lawes’s music and the antique viol with great sympathy.
