Byrd: Clarifica me

Album review

The keyboard pieces of William Byrd are not as well known as his choral music. But organist Léon Berben argues in his booklet that they did not deserve the opprobrium of historian Charles Burney, who opined that "the loss, to refined ears, would not be very great" if they "should forever remain unplayed and undeciphered." Some have an experimental flavor quite different from that of any of Byrd's various types of choral music. The stars of the show here are Berben and the organ he plays, a small Dutch instrument built in 1521 and recently restored. Berben studied with Gustav Leonhardt and Ton Koopman, and his playing particularly resembles the latter in its precision and its articulation of small details such as the pungent dissonances attached to the phrase ends at several points in the Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La (track 13), a hexachord fantasy cultivated by various English Renaissance composers but rarely in such an extreme way. The organ itself, nicely illustrated on the disc's cover, has a very appealing, rather piercing voice. Berben's booklet offers a detailed account of Byrd's suspense-filled life as a Catholic in Protestant Elizabethan England, but has little to say about the music itself. Particularly frustrating is the remark that "[t]he choice of pieces for this recording is no attempt to answer the often-raised question of which instrument Byrd wrote his keyboard music for -- organ, harpsichord, virginal, or clavichord." Berben does not tell the listener why he did select the works included, which are a mix of the various common English types represented in his oeuvre. And the use of the organ is suspect in some of the secular works, especially The Queen's Alman (track 5), where it seems to work at cross purposes with the dance rhythms in the music. The sacred polyphony and especially the abstract fantasias, grounds, and Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La work very well on this organ, however, and the disc benefits from a certain X factor: there's something uncompromising and tough in Byrd's musical personality, and Berben catches it precisely.

© TiVo