The Tudors – I Love, Alas
Purcell Consort of Voices
Label
Decca
Catalogue No.
4822570
Barcode
00028948225705
Format
1-CD
About

First issued by Argo in 1969 under the title ‘Elizabethan Words and Music’, this anthology of madrigals, poetry and pieces for lute is a further reissue by Eloquence from the Purcell Consort of Voices. ‘Metaphysical Tobacco’
(480 7740) is another reissue as part of ‘The Tudors’, an Eloquence series which focuses on the composers who made England and especially London a capital for music in the 18th century.

The Purcell Consort of Voices was among the leading UK-based vocal ensembles in the early-music revival of the 1960s and 1970s. Its founder, Grayston Burgess, was schooled in the foremost Continental groups such as the Leonhardt Consort and Thomas Binks’s Studio der Frühen Musik. One singer to a part, light voices, clean attack, lively rhythms: these were the performance principles followed by Leonhardt, Binks and Burgess who in turn paved the way for the likes of the Schütz Choir of London and the Monteverdi Choir.

Such principles ideally suit the Elizabethan aesthetic which is explored on this album through a telling juxtaposition of well-known works by the madrigal-masters Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. They are linked by galliards of John Dowland (played by Robert Spencer) and the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, recited by the actor Jeremy Brett who was best-known for playing Sherlock Holmes in a long-running British TV series.

TRACK LISTING / ARTISTS

THE TUDORS
I Love, Alas
Elizabethan Life in Music, Song and PoetryJ
JOHN DOWLAND: My Lady Rich’s Galliard
SIDNEY: Loved I am and yet complain of Love
THOMAS MORLEY: I love, alas, I love thee
THOMAS WEELKES: Lady, your eye my love enforced
ANTHONY HOLBORNE: The Countess of Pembroke’s Paradise
SIDNEY: O fair, O sweet, when I do look on thee
WILBYE: Lady, when I behold the roses sprouting
THOMAS WEELKES: Sing we at pleasure
SIDNEY: All my sense thy sweetness gained
VAUTOR: Lock up, fair lids
ANONYMOUS: Loth to depart
ORLANDO GIBBONS: Ah, dear heart, why do you rise
SIDNEY: My mistress lours
THOMAS WEELKES: My Phyllis bids me pack away
KIRBYE: See, what a maze of error
JOHN DOWLAND: My Lord Willobie’s Welcome Home
SIDNEY: With two strange fires
JOHN WARD: Hope of my heart
VAUTOR: Never did any more delight
THOMAS TOMKINS: Come, shepherd, sing with me
SIDNEY: My lute, within thyself thy tunes enclose
FRANCIS PILKINGTON: Of softly singing lute
ANONYMOUS: Sir Philip Sidney’s Lamentation

Robert Spencer, lute
Jeremy Brett, reader
Purcell Consort of Voices
Grayston Burgess

Recording information

Recording Producer & Engineer: Michael Bremner
Recording Location: Decca Studio 3, West Hampstead, London, UK, 29 May 1969

Reviews

‘It is a very pleasurable collection indeed. The madrigals are all excellent… The performances are good, too…those which demand sustained singing are done extremely well.’ Gramophone