Byrd: The Carman's Whistle

Second volume of a unique project: the first complete recording of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book! The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is the largest surviving collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean keyboard music, comprising more than 300 works, written by various composers, including such celebrities as John Bull, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and J.P. Sweelinck.

This second volume is dedicated to William Byrd, and contains the famous Walsingham variations, and the variations on the popular tune “The Carman’s Whistle”, music of great virtuosity and ingenuity. A great achievement of Pieter‐Jan Belder, one of the most respected and frequently recorded keyboard (harpsichord, clavichord, virginal, organ, hammerklavier) players of today.

His recordings of Bach, Rameau, CPE Bach and Scarlatti (complete Sonatas!) have met with great critical acclaim in the international press.

Belder plays a unique original Ruckers instrument from 1604, the details of which are described in the extensive liner notes in the booklet.

Volume 1 was issued on BC94303.

Though he professed not to enjoy concert giving, Grainger was one of the greatest pianists of the earlier twentieth century and had an intimate understanding of the capabilities of the piano and how best to write for it. He possessed a unique compositional voice and was, in many ways, part of the great composer–pianist tradition stretching from Liszt to Busoni for whom the concert transcription was an essential part of their art.

This recording contains the majority of Grainger’s concert transcriptions of music by other composers (his few Bach arrangements are performed by Piers Lane on Bach Piano Transcriptions Volume 3). They range from the folk-inspired Irish Dances of Stanford, full of Grainger’s characteristically extrovert piano writing, to the hyper-romantic lushness and incredible pianistic sophistication of his Ramble on Love based on Richard Strauss’s ‘Rosenkavalier’. All are superbly played by Piers Lane.

The unrivalled master of the consort song and virtually the founding father of keyboard music, William Byrd -no less than John Dowland - is well served in these arrangements with viola da gamba duo and with lute. The purely instrumental pieces beautifully set off the telling voice of star countertenor Daniel Taylor.