Release Date: 31 July 2006
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313286423
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: PHILIPS
Description
Peter Philips (1560/61-1628) Harpsichord Music Peter Philips was born Catholic in Protestant England around 1560. He left England in 1582, following his studies with William Byrd, in order to learn the Italian musical style in Rome. There he lived at the English College, along with other refugees from English politics and religious persecution. In 1585 he entered the service of Lord Thomas Paget, another English Catholic, and travelled extensively throughout Europe. By 1591 he had settled in Antwerp and married. His wife Cornelia died a year later, and his only child, Leonora, in 1599. Philips, a member of the Brussels court since 1597, entered the priesthood and was ordained in 1609. None of Philips' keyboard music was published during his life-time, although his music was very well known and quite popular. Several pieces for organ stem from his later years, but he composed no more secular music - consort works, secular vocal works, or harpsichord works - after becoming a priest. Nineteen of his 32 surviving keyboard works are included in the famous Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a large English manuscript of the period. His complete keyboard works exist in a variety of other manuscripts, as detailed by David Smith in his comprehensive edition (Musica Britannica lxxv, 1999). Keyboard intabulations (arrangements) of popular Italian madrigals and French chansons account for fourteen, almost half, of Philips' keyboard works. These keyboard pieces include added idiomatic embellishments such as trills, scales, and arpeggios, needed to express the vocal text with insight and understanding. This art form, expressing the feeling of words without the words themselves, can sometimes better communicate the meaning of a vocal work than were they to be sung. Philips made intabulations of music by Giulio Caccini, Orlande de Lassus, Luca Marenzio, and Alessandro Striggio, some of the most famous and popular composers of vocal music of his day. Nine of these settings are heard on this recording, including an intabulation of one of his own madrigals. Throughout the vocal repertoire in this genre, the poetic texts speak of love: being smitten, being rejected, and the double entendre pain of love's end. These beautiful texts often rapidly change emotion or affect. Such shifts in mood include effusive outpourings of love, adoration, wistful sighs, eagerness, smiling, weeping, crying out in pain, resignation and loss, quiet suffering, bitterness and irony. Philips strives in his intabulations to match the changing affects of the texts through shifts in mood, mode, rhythm, range, and figuration. Programmatic effects abound in all of the intabulations. In Le Rossignuol, the soaring and swooping lines of a bird in flight express the caged bird remembering his freedom, and pining for it. In Bonjour, mon coeur one effusive term of endearment follows another until the beloved is addressed, with the use of strange chromatic tones and surprising rests, as 'ma douce
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yaqi Yang; Margarita Parsamyan; Robynne Redmon; Minghao Liu; Frank Ragsdale; Kim Josephson; Kevin S
Vilmos Csikos; Olivier Lechardeur; Manon Lamaison
Tomas Cotik; Martingale Ensemble; Ken Selden
