Won’t you step into the home of the Grenes of Great Milton? This recording will transport you back to rural England at the turn of the seventeenth century and the intimate, introspective environment of domestic music-making. And how fortunate the Grenes were to have in their service John Danyel (1564-c1626), a composer of music so tuneful and alert to the texts he is setting.
We have here an entertaining selection of vocal solo and quartet music, which was printed in 1606, interspersed – as it would have been at the Grenes’s house – with lute solos and duets (which, apparently, may have been only partly composed by Danyel), suited to a variety of occasions. Two of the works, Mrs E. her funeral tears for the death of her husband and Can doleful notes?, are in three parts and skilfully interrelated. Those of Mrs E.’s mourning each employ the same final line of text, “Pine, fret, consume, swell, burst and die”, though Danyel sets it differently each time (I won’t spoil the effect by telling you how). The melodic treatment of the second trio offers stark contrasts, between the wandering lines of “Can doleful notes”, the scalic “No, let chromatic tunes” and “Uncertain turns of thought” (with its wonderfully poised setting of “then die and dying last”), which ultimately inform a progression of thought. Coy Daphne fled is a narrative in which the first stanza is sung by Nigel Short and the answer by Libby Crabtree, to great effect; its connection with the Grene family, and Anne Grene (the dedicatee) in particular, is evident from the final line: “She rests still Green, and so wish I to be”.
Nigel Short takes the lion’s share of the songs, bringing to them poise, beauty of tone and formidable vocal control – nothing less than the music requires. The magical opening track, Like as the lute delights, immediately signals the prominence on the CD and the sublime skills of Short’s principal accompanist, David Miller, who ends the recording with Danyel’s divisions on Browning (Mistress Anne Grene her leaves be greene), playing a specially tuned nine-course lute.
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