Coloured for Sight and Sound

I’m so pleased that my review of Stephen Groves’ book, The Sound of the English Picturesque: Georgian Vocal Music, Haydn, and Landscape Aesthetics has been published in the latest issue of the leading journal Early Music.

I so much enjoyed reading Stephen’s fascinating exploration of the concept of the musical picturesque in late eighteenth-century English song and Haydn’s The Seasons. Here’s an extract from my review:

“The pastoral mode was ubiquitous in the 18th-century English artistic landscape, transporting audiences to a virtuous, idealized Golden Age of shepherds and nymphs, which offered an attractive rural retreat from the complexities of urban life. However, the pastoral’s sister aesthetic, the picturesque, though much applied to art and literature of this period, has rarely been embraced by musicologists. Groves’s The sound of the English picturesque seeks to redress this imbalance, arguing for the strong relevance of the picturesque to English vocal repertoire of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From the outset, Groves is at pains to demonstrate that the picturesque is qualitatively distinct from the pastoral. For a musical work to express the picturesque, it must venture beyond pastoral convention and instead express, in painterly fashion, the beauty of a particular natural landscape. English composers, Groves suggests, were able to capture the picturesque through musical means, mirroring the techniques of Gainsborough and Capability Brown in their respective arts of landscape painting and gardening.”

To read the full review (though you’ll need an institutional login), just click the link below:

Coloured for sight and sound | Early Music | Oxford Academic

Review: Caledonia to the Capital

I am delighted that my PhD thesis has been reviewed by Jane Pettegree, Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, on Soundyngs, a blog which aims to stimulate research into the history of Scottish music. I’m looking forward to giving a concert and accompanying talk at the University of St Andrews in the autumn!

She writes:

“I was particularly struck by the chapters on Robert Bremner, which took this figure comprehensively out of the shadows and into the spotlight as a cultural agent of considerable importance. Chapter 4 significantly extends what we can say about the entrepreneurial role played by Bremner as a cultural advocate of Scottish music on the wider European and Atlantic stage.”

“Currently this research is not a glossy published book, but it deserves to become one, and even in its format as a dissertation it is a lively and useful read.”

To read the whole review, follow this link:

Review: Mary-Jannet Leith, on Scottish Musicians, Music-Making and Culture in Eighteenth Century London 1741-1815 – Soundyngs

A floral Gramophone Review

My Ensemble Hesperi has received a glowing review from Charlotte Gardner at Gramophone magazine for our latest release, A Gift for your Garden! She writes:

“The young members of award-winning London-based early music Ensemble Hesperi… have brough this carefully considered collection to multicoloured and attractively soft-polished life - think of a playing manner that takes the tack of easy-going, amiably convivial warmth and intimacy rather than super-taut, air-swishing pop, bristle and zing.

Appropriately enough, the Telemann works are particularly happy beneficiaries of this approach: his solo recorder Fantasia No 9 in E, transposed here to calmer G, appears gorgeously dulcetly lyric from Leith, her supremely nimble Vivace included; likewise the first of the ‘Paris’ Sonatas…, where the close-communicating instruments’ sensually poetic voicing and evenly weighted balance produces a showstopper of an Allegro, its radiant exuberance couched within satiny glow; then, while the more madcap virtuosity of his Polish folk-influenced Trio Sonata in G minor (wow, Leith’s rapid Vivace passagework!) comes suitable brighter-hued, there’s still a lovely cantabile nonchalant about the warmth and expressiveness of the strings’ slow-moving, recorder-embellished Largo lines. Such an enjoyable programme. Bravo!”

To read the full review, head to this link:

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/a-gift-for-your-garden-telemann-handel-graun-oswald