‘The most principall and chiefest kind of musicke’

Abstract

In his influential 1597 treatise A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke Thomas Morley presents—through the medium of a Platonic dialogue among the characters Polymathes, Philomathes and Master—all the knowledge and skills necessary, in his opinion, to master the art of composition. One of the main themes of the work, which is explored in its third part, is an insistence that any aspiring musician should study Italian music in both its present but also historical styles, and as part of this the Master describes key vocal and instrumental forms. He begins his discussion of the latter with the ‘fantasie’, giving it the epithet found in the title of this review and defining it as ‘when a musician taketh a point at his pleasure, and wresteth and turneth it as he list, making either much or little of it according as shall seeme best in his own conceit’. Whether or not any of the northern European, High Baroque composers whose music is featured on this selection of albums would have known of Morley or his seminal treatise is a matter for speculation—yet each of the recordings under the spotlight has something of the fantastical about it, whether in form or in substance. This is, unsurprisingly, most apparent on Alina Ibragimova’s Georg Philipp Telemann: Fantasias for solo violin (Hyperion cda68384, issued 2022)—indeed, Joseph Fort’s booklet note references Morley’s text—which presents the complete set of solo violin fantasias published by Telemann alongside those for flute, keyboard and viola da gamba between 1732 and 1736. While not on the scale of, say, the solo violin works of J. S. Bach—these are all three- or four-movement works, each lasting between four and eight minutes—they nevertheless show Telemann at his most sparkling and inventive; as Fort notes, they were primarily aimed at the amateur market, and ‘designed as much for the pleasure of playing as for the pleasure of listening’. That is not to say, of course, that they present no challenge to the professional; in the hands of Ibragimova, these pieces that could sound merely gemütlich or even perhaps trite in places instead come across as rich in invention and variety, charming little miniatures that entertain without outstaying their welcome. She adopts a fairly brisk approach, which suits the tone of her 1570 Amati, and this for me works better here than the more relaxed tempos of Rachel Podger, for example.