Peter Holman is exceptional among professional musicians for his scholarly command of his chosen repertory, deriving from his work on archives and his command of detail. He is a communicator as lecturer and writer as well as keyboard player and conductor. Readers will know his thoroughly researched CD notes, and that for ''Four and Twenty Fiddlers'' is no exception: for example, as to the ''firks'' which appear in Matthew Locke's Suite in G minor, we are told that the verb 'to firk' means ''to move rapidly, to dance, jig, flaunt or frisk about''. He puts his research to practical use, performing and recording his treasure trove of English music and providing fresh perspectives on known works, as here with Purcell's Chacony. With The Parley of Instruments he continues to produce a series of recordings for Hyperion entitled ''The English Orpheus'' which, together with this CD, form an aural counterpart to his monumental study, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540-1690 (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1993).
Holman is attentive to detail over period instruments and playing techniques: in this recording the violins, played with short bows which let the music breathe, are copies of the sort of early seventeenth-century Italian instruments the king's musicians favoured: silvery-toned violins, translucent violas and soft-edged bass violins. The branles by Locke and the incidental dance music by Grabu for Valentinian are performed without continuo, in accordance with Holman's research. The use of continuo (harpsichord and theorbo) elsewhere adds a pleasing gravitas to the ensemble texture and the addition of oboes and then recorders (played by Paul Goodwin and Lorraine Wood) to the ensemble in the first two airs of Grabu's Valentinian music creates particularly striking contrasts, at least in the context of the recording. For many the difference will be a novelty.
Laudable on so many planes, the recording nevertheless raises a vexing question: how should one listen to a single CD of 49 tracks, some of them lasting only half a minute? Most of it was composed as occasional or functional music—to punctuate courtly rituals, to dance to, and to accompany plays (announcing and filling in between acts of plays and underscoring action on stage)—and not intended to be listened to divorced from a visual context. Holman kindly provides probable scenarios for the music, which encourage the listener to imagine the visual context—something which few of us are equipped to do. The result, even so, is unsatisfactory: with few exceptions, the music is bitty and not inherently memorable nor, like film soundtracks, was it particularly intended to be. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to hear for the first time music by Banister and Grabu (a French-trained Catalan composer whom Holman champions) and Purcell's recently discovered Staircase Overture.'