The only complete available recording of a landmark in Elizabethan keyboard music. With a huge catalogue of Brilliant Classics recordings to his credit, Pieter-Jan Belder has won particular praise for his ambitious project to record the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (95915), a treasury of English keyboard music from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era. Now he focuses his attention on the greatest English composer of that age, with a volume dedicated to William Byrd, and to his largest single collection of music for the keyboard.
Byrd's vocal works would have assured him a place in history as the greatest English composer of his generation. Yet he was also arguably the outstanding composer of his time in the realm of instrumental music - probably the first musician to achieve supreme stature simultaneously in music for voices, for instrumental consort, and for solo keyboard instruments.
Though it has passed through the hands of many celebrated figures such as Elizabeth I herself, My Lady Nevells Booke has belonged continuously to members of the Nevill family since 1830, and has been kept at the family seat near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. When Christopher Hogwood made the first complete recording of its contents, he wrote that it 'occupies a unique and privileged position from the musical, musicological, chronological and calligraphic points of view.'
The copying of the pieces was undertaken and completed in September 1591 by John Baldwin, a clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and Lady Nevell’s name was incorporated into the design of the cover as well as the pieces dedicated to her opening each of the volume’s three main sections.
The Lady Nevell in question was a generous, capable and cultivated woman who endowed a charitable school and an Oxford college.
Like The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, My Ladye Nevells Booke embraces the most popular genres of its day. Its contents are typical fare for English Renaissance composers: dances, variation sets, marches, contrapuntal fantasies and programmatic pieces, and the repertory comes from a period beginning in the mid 1560s. Byrd makes each of these genres his own with consummate ingenuity; the variety and the beauty of the collection as a whole rewards players and listeners alike. The CD booklet contains an extensive essay on My Ladye Nevells Booke by Jon Baxendale, who is co-editor of the latest edition of the score.
Praise for the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book:
’Utterly enthralling… If ever a project deserved the term magnum opus this complete recording of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is it.’ Early Music Today
‘The standard of playing is consistently high, the variety of music on offer remarkably varied.’ Gramophone
‘The model against which all other recordings of the Fitzwilliam will be matched. This is a seminal and monumental work of the age, and thus can be considered a keystone of any collection of keyboard music.’ Fanfare
- Of sources from the sixteenth century, My Ladye Nevells Booke is one of the most beautiful manuscripts to have come down to us. It is an oblong book that is sumptuously bound in red morocco leather, with a highly decorated cover that bears its one-time owner’s name on both its front and rear, a title that is still used. Its contents are inscribed with a style that is rarely seen elsewhere: noteheads are shaped as diamonds, and incredible care has been put into the calligraphy. Its contents contain the music of a single composer, William Byrd, and the book is the most important known source of his keyboard music.
- William Byrd (c.1540 – 4 July 1623) was an English composer of late Renaissance music. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native England and on the continent. On his death, he was reported in the records of the Chapel Royal as ‘father of Music’. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school), and consort music. His keyboard music is of the highest order, it includes dances like the Gaillard and Pavan, Voluntaries and sets of variations on songs.
- Pieter-Jan Belder is one of the world’s foremost keyboard players, with an astonishing number of CD’s to his name: the complete Scarlatti Sonatas, Bach keyboard works, Rameau, Soler, Duphly, Marais, CPE Bach, Corelli, Purcell, Telemann, the complete Fitzwilliam Virginal Book...to be continued. Critics praise his versatility, his innate feeling for style, his impeccable technique: “Superb keyboard artistry and consummate technique”(MusicWeb), “alive, fresh-sounding and thoroughly engaged..” (Fanfare), “The most vital Bach performances of the moment” (Volkskrant).
