Various Artists - Art Contemporain - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Now into it's seventh volume, Pieter-Jan Belder's series continues to uncover more works from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. In this volume he turns his attention to the works of father and son Giles and Richard Farnaby, William Byrd, and selected anonymous works. The book and it's manuscripts provide us with an insight into Elizabethan and early Jacobean socio-cultural life. After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 by Henry VIII followed by Mary Tudor's blood-soaked crackdown, it was clear that being a Protestant in Tudor England was risky business. Once Queen Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, she established a moderate form of Protestantism and halted the campaign of religious persecution. But the damage was already done, and many composers decided to steer clear of religion altogether and focus their efforts on secular music. The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is a vital record of such works. Compiled in the late 1700s, the book today resides in a dedicated museum in Cambridge. The first section of this surveys Giles Farnaby's musical output. Bony Sweet Robin is a setting of a popular Renaissance tune and Sir Walter Raleigh once in a letter to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester wrote that Dudley was in the Queen's favor, describing him as 'her Sweet Robin'. This graceful arrangement is Continental in it's nature and similar to the Italian madrigal, with a conjunct and cantabile melody line and through-composed structure. As for Richard Farnaby, the four pieces recorded here are all that survives of his output. Nobodyes jig is his best-known work; a playful dance which requires a skilled performer to successfully execute the fast-paced polyphonic music. The final part features works by Byrd as well as anonymous works including almans, pavans, and keyboard arrangements of lute pieces and popular ballads.

Not only a major figure in the record industry and show business, Eddie Barclay also left his mark on the InchpeopleInch pages of the tabloids he was famous for the parties he hosted for socialites in Saint-Tropez, while his friendships with the stars made him a public legend. Yet few remember that Eddie Barclay was a precursor he was one of the first in France to import jazz and rock'n'roll records from America. When he created his own tag, Barclay Records, he brought in legendary music figures like Quincy Jones and Boris Vian, Frank Ténot or Daniel Filipacchi to work with him on the artistic side. Not many today know that Eddie Barclay was also a pianist, bandleader and jazz fan with a hundred of his own recordings to his name... Here Jean Baptiste Mersiol throws light on the forgotten history of this arranger, performer and producer with a 3 album anthology that deserves it's place in music history.

This anthology devoted to the riches of French advertising provides a refresher course filled with historic sketches and popular ditties, each more delightfully dated than the next. Beginning with the first ads of the talkies - which arrived with the first bulky radio sets - and continuing up to the Sixties, these went out over the air in France's glorious post-war years, when consumerism was all the rage, and also a little drink before dinner, as you can hear in Jean-Baptiste Mersiol's collection, a kind of audio postcard sent back from another age that seems exquisitely vintage today.