Les plaisirs les plus charmants - CD Booklet

DELPHIAN

Les plaisirs DCD34011

les plus charmants G o r d o nB a F erries roque guitars

[1-2] Francesco Corbetta (1615-81) (Varii scherzi di sonate per la chitara spagnola, 1648) 1 Prelud [1.15] 2 Chiacona in C major [2.16]

Special thanks to Helen Jamieson and the Scottish Arts Council; the Music Librarians of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Arnold Myers, Darryl Martin, and Raymond Parks of the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments; Esther Carré; and Iain Gallagher.

[3-10] Robert de Visée (c.1650-c.1725) Suite in C major (Livre de pièces de guitarre dédié au Roy, 1686) 3 Prélude [0.47] 4 Allemande [2.19] 5 Courante [1.43] 6 Sarabande [1.13] 7 Gigue a la maniere engloise [1.05] 8 Gavotte [1.00] 9 Menuet [0.41] 10 Autre menuet [1.09]

The second de Visée menuet is dedicated to Iain and Kim Gallagher.

[11-17] Henri Grénerin (c.1668-c.1748) Suite in D major (Livre de guitarre et autres pièces de musique, 1680) 11 Prélude [1.28] 12 Allemande [1.55] 13 Courante [1.19] 14 Passacaille [2.22] 15 Sarabande [3.27] 16 Gigue [1.05] 17 Menuet [1.16] [18-22] Rémy Médard (fl.17th C.) Suite in G minor (Pièces de guitarre, 1676) 18 Prélude d'accords chromatiques 19 Allemande 20 Sarabande 21 Gigue 22 Passacaille

Delphian Records Ltd PO Box 17179 Edinburgh EH12 5YD www.delphianrecords.co.uk

Also featuring Gordon Ferries Love and Reconquest: Music from Renaissance Spain Fires of Love DCD34003

[0.44] [1.53] [1.55] [1.22] [1.38]

23 Francesco Corbetta Caprice de chacone [2.41] (La guitarre royalle dédiée au Roy de la Grande-Bretagne, 1670) 1

Recorded at the Reid Concert Hall, Bristo Square, Edinburgh 2-4 January 2003 Recorded with 24-Bit stereo technology Producer: Paul Baxter Executive Producer: Kevin Findlan Design and Photography: ©Delphian Records Ltd Cover image: Rémy Médard, Sarabande from Suite in G minor Pièces de guitarre, 1676 (Courtesy Editions Minkoff, Geneva) 2003 Delphian Records Ltd ©2003 Delphian Records Ltd

Scottish early music ensemble Fires of Love serves up a feast of songs and ballads from the Spanish Renaissance and early Baroque, with a freshness critic Norman Lebrecht calls simply 'beautiful'. Repertoire includes works

by Luys de Narváez, Miguel de Fuenllana, Luis Milán, Alonso Mudarra, and Juan del Encina.

order online at www.delphianrecords.co.uk or call +44 (0)709 215 7149 10

[24-29] Francesco Corbetta Suite in A minor (La guitarre royalle dédiée au Roy de la Grande-Bretagne, 1670) 24 Prélude [0.38] 25 Allemande [3.42] 26 Courante [2.44] 27 Sarabande [2.24] 28 Gigue [1.53] 29 Passacaille [1.55] [30-35] Pièces de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Manuscrit rés. f 844, early 18th century, trans. anon.)

30 Robert de Visée Masquerade [1.20] 31 Marin Marais (1656-1728) Air [1.05] 32 André Campra (1660-1744) Musete [1.38] 33 Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) Entrée d'Isis [1.25] 34 Jean-Baptiste Lully Entrée d'Apollon [2.37] 35 François Couperin (1668-1733) Sœur Monique [3.11] [36-41] Antoine Carré (fl.17th C.) Suite in G minor (Livre de pièces de guitarre de musique, c.1675) 36 Prélude 37 Sarabande 38 Allemande 39 Sarabande « plainte » 40 Courante 41 Sarabande

[1.05] [1.35] [2.47] [2.07] [0.50] [2.38]

Total playing time [72.14]

Frontispiece from Rémy Médard, Pièces de guitarre, 1676

Instruments: Tracks 1-29, 35-41 D. Sutherland, after Jean Voboam, Paris 1690 Tracks 30-34 French, c.1760 (EUCHMI 2471) Pitch: A=392

(Courtesy Editions Minkoff, Geneva) 9

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Photo: Delphian Records

late sixteenth and early seventeenth century for indecency. Lope de Vega, in his La Dorotea of 1632, seems to combine the musical and moralistic complaints against the guitar: 'He (Espinel) has brought us those new verses, décimas or espinelas, and the five strings of the guitar, so that now everyone forgets the old noble instruments as well as the old dances, what with these wild gesticulations and lascivious movements of the chaconne, which are so offensive to virtue, the chastity and the seemly silence of the ladies'.

« Les plaisirs les plus charmants » La guitare baroque française The arrival of the five course guitar towards the end of the sixteenth century in Spain appears to have been met with much condemnation, despite its obvious and growing popularity. The vituperative tone of contemporary writings on the subject seems to divide into two types. On one hand were those who lamented the passing of the noble vihuela (a Spanish lute variant), and its more serious polyphonic repertoire. For example, in 1611 Don Sebastian de Corarrubias Orozco writes in his Tesoro de la lengua Castellana o Española that 'this instrument has been highly regarded until the present time, and has had most excellent musicians, but since guitars were invented, those who devote themselves to the study of the vihuela are small in number. It has been a great loss, as all kinds of plucked music could be played upon it: but the guitar is no more than a cow bell, so easy to play, especially rasguedo (strumming), there is not a stable boy who is not a musician on the guitar'.The other strain of protest against the guitar seems to have been moralistic in nature. Much of this seems to arise out of the guitar's association with dancing, which as an art form, has often been at odds with church dogma. Rodrigo Caro writes in 1626 that 'it appears that the devil has brought these dances out of hell. The lasciviousness and indecencies which the young people swallow as easily as sweet tasting poison, and which at very least destroys their souls'. Some dances appear to have connections to the New World; a Spanish priest in Mexico compared the zarabanda to a licencious Indian dance: the cuecueheuycatl. Even Cervantès, who used the zarabanda in his plays, claims that it was invented in hell.The dance was indeed banned several times in the

A certain amount can also be gleaned from the art of the period, such as Velasquèz's 'Three Musicians' (1620) in which a young guitarist holds a guitar in one hand and a drink in the other, or Theodor Rombout's similarly titled painting, in which the guitarist strums his guitar in favour of a lute, left face down on the table.

In Francisco Zurbaro's 'The Temptations of St Jerome' mural for the monastery of Guadalupe (1638-9), it is fascinating to see that the first in line of the beautiful female musicians is a guitarist, with the emaciated saint's hands thrown up toward her, his face turned away in distaste.

The arrival of the guitar in France initially gave rise to a sea of criticism, especially from the lute-playing cognoscenti. Here, the case against the guitar is pejoratively expressed by Pierre Trichet in 1630: 'Even in France, one finds courtesans and ladies who turn themselves into Spanish monkeys, trying to imitate them, demonstrating that they prefer foreign importations to their own native product. In this, they resemble those who though they could dine well at their own table, would rather go out to eat bacon, onions and black bread. For who is not aware that 3

Gordon Ferries 8

The decline of the continuo towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, meant that the new six stringed 'classical' guitar, although highly popular with amateurs and a new generation of virtuoso guitarist composers, was no longer part of the major musical forms of its day.

Having initially studied classical guitar at Napier University, Gordon Ferries continued to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where he specialised in Renaissance and Baroque instruments.

He has since established himself as one of Scotland's foremost lutenists and early guitarists. A collaborator with many ensembles, he has worked with the Scottish Early Music Consort, the BT Scottish Ensemble, and the English ensemble Red Campion, among others. In addition, he has accompanied many singers such as Lorna Anderson and Stephen Carter. Gordon was a founding member of Fires of Love, whose debut recording Love and Reconquest on Delphian (DCD34003) has been critically acclaimed. He has performed in venues and festivals across the UK, including the Leicester and Swaledale festivals and the Georgian Concert Society in Edinburgh. He has also performed and arranged music for the BBC. In 2002 Gordon was awarded an Arts Council grant for overseas research into seventeenth century French guitar manuscripts, the fruits of which appear on this recording, which includes previously unrecorded works. He is currently the musical director of the Baroque ensemble Symphonie des Plaisirs and lectures in guitar and lute at Napier University.

This situation was not entirely remedied until the guitar once again became a part of mainstream musical culture in the twentieth century, again being blamed at times for the moral disintegration of its age. © 2003 Gordon J. S. Ferries

« les plaisirs les plus charmants, sans l'amoureuse flamme pour contenter une âme non point d'attrait assez puissant » Molière, Le malade imaginaire

the lute is what is proper for the French, and the most delightful of all musical instruments? Still, there are some of our nation, who leave everything behind in order to take up and study the guitar. Is not this because it is much easier to perfect oneself in this than in lute playing, which requires long and arduous study before one can acquire the necessary skill and disposition? Or is it because it has a certain something which is feminine and pleasing to women, flattering their hearts and making them inclined to voluptuousness'.

by Robert Laneham, a favourite of the Earl of Leicester: 'sumtyme I foote it with dauncing; noow with my gittern, and els with my cittern, and then carroll I up a song withall, that by and by they cum flocking about me lyke beez too hunny: and ever they cry anoother good Laneham anoother!'.

Over a century later, the great French painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) beautifully captures the guitar's sensual essence, placing it centre stage in his many depictions of the fêtes galantes, the epitome of the French Baroque pastoral idyll. Many practical elements must also have been taken into consideration by the painter, such as the guitar's portability, as shown by the casual hanging on the player's back by a ribbon when not in use. Alongside this, we find many references to the relative ease with which the guitar can be kept in tune. Luis Briçeño, states in his Método mui facilissimo para aprender a tañer la guittara a lo español (Paris 1626), that 'if it get out of tune easily, it is just as easy to tune it again'. The vast majority of Watteau's guitarists are playing rather than tuning, whilst his lutenists and theorbists are significantly frozen in the act of tuning.

What is this feminine quality? Is Trichet referring to a facet of the instrument as well as to its obvious appeal to women? It seems possible that the baroque guitar's absence of a real bass represents the femininity derided by lovers of the lute (with its noble bass constantly being augmented by the addition of new strings).

Facets of guitar technique, such as campanellas (little bells), produced via the re-entrant tuning allowing notes to run into each other, and above all the strumming potential, may have struck some more serious observers as fickle or coquettish. Perhaps even the overtly feminine shape of the guitar's body was a contributing factor. It is certainly true that an extraordinary number of portraits from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, feature young women posing with guitars, perhaps most famously Vermeer's 'Guitar Player' (1672). Indeed, the Comte de Gramont states in his memoirs, describing the guitar's popularity in Restoration England, that 'even on the dressing tables of all the beauties, one could rely on seeing a guitar as well as rouge and beauty spots'.

Watteau also paid close attention to the authenticity of the playing styles of those depicted to lend verisimilitude, extending his skill to the strumming hands of his guitarists - one observes that the worn area on contemporary guitars is usually in exactly the place strummed by Watteau's guitarists. Symbolically too, the guitar has an erotic role, being the centrepiece in the painter's scenes of seduction, seen especially in 'La gamme d'amour', in which the guitar gently strummed by the galant, with his wandering eye, begins the sexual conquest portrayed.

The seductive qualities of the guitar seem to underpin the moral distaste engendered by it, and are neatly illustrated by an earlier quotation from a c.1548 letter 7

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We can conjecture that the music being played by these guitarists would be fairly close to that featured on this recording, if not even by some of the same composers.

It is important to realise that the guitar's popularity in such scenes and in general, must also be due to its favour among the French nobility, and with Louis XIV in particular.Voltaire wrote that 'the only thing that he (the king) ever learned to do was to dance and to play the guitar'.

Central to the popularity of the guitar in France was the arrival at court of the Italian Francesco Corbetta (1615-81). Corbetta is the epitome of the travelling virtuoso, who in the course of his career managed to ingratiate himself to two Baroque monarchs, Louis XIV and Charles II of England. Corbetta was first summoned to France by Cardinal Mazarin to teach Louis, then the Dauphin. He soon adapted his music to French tastes, abandoning Italian tablature in favour of French convention. Corbetta was certainly at the centre of court musical life, including playing in the orchestra of Lully (a fellow Italian and also a guitarist), leading an ensemble of guitars in Le ballet de la galanterie du temps, in which the king danced.

Corbetta accompanied Charles II to England for the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 and found himself in huge favour with the English nobility. A sarabande by him is mentioned by the Compte de Gramont as being at the centre of a sexual intrigue perpetrated by the Duke of York. Corbetta's favour with the king was obviously high, as in 1661 the composer was granted a sole patent for the game L'acca di Catalonia, from which he managed to accumulate much wealth and also to achieve the financial ruination of many young men. He is further 5

mentioned by Pepys in his diary entry on the 5th of August 1667: '[A]fter done with Duke of York and coming out through his dressing room, I there spied Signor Francisco tuning his gittar, and Monsieur de Puy with him, who did make him play to me, which he did most admirably - so well as I was mightly troubled that all the pains should have been taken on so bad an instrument'. Pepys, an ardent supporter of the lute, did however, eventually change his opinion of the guitar, having some music for it in his private library.

Rémy Médard, also a pupil of Corbetta, a writer as well as a guitarist/composer, was responsible for the epitaph on the death of his teacher, in which he described Corbetta as the 'amphion of our years', who made the guitar 'speak in the true language of love'.

Médard's Pièces de guitarre (1676) also contains pastoral poetry (presumably by the composer). Typically, the nature of the poetry is that of pastoral love, always engraved next to a sarabande or menuet, providing a musical and poetic counterpoint to images such as those inWatteau's paintings.

Corbetta's music on this recording comes from La guitarre royale (Paris 1671), dedicated to Charles II, alongside other members of the English aristocracy.

The pieces are written mostly in suites in the French style, bringing the guitar to a new level of sophistication and grace. His death in Paris in 1681 was marked by a colleague and possibly a pupil, Robert de Visée (c. 1650- c.1725), by the composition of an allemande: Tombeau de Monsieur Francisque Corbette. De Visée, a court musician, was also known as a lutenist, theorbist, singer and violist. His style is marked by his melodic approach to the guitar, with less use of strummed passages. The C major suite recorded here comes from his Livre de guittare dédié au roy (1682), in which he states that 'I have attempted to conform to the tastes of skilful people, in giving my pieces, as far as my weak talents permit, the flavour of those of the inimitable Monsieur de Lulli'. Also evident is his use of striking, unexpected dissonances, such as the unprepared chromatic appoggiaturas towards the end of the courante. The popularity of his music is illustrated by the extensive amount that exists in manuscript.

The G minor suite on this disc is a fine example of Médard's craft. In the preface, he attempts to use the music's supposedly easier execution as a selling point: 'I claim to have entirely followed the manner of the famous Francisque Corbet, with the difference that I have found for my pieces, a facility that he did not take pains to seek'. The prelude of the G minor suite is worthy of note. Médard has simply written a series of chromatic chords which he invites the performer to strum two or three times, as the taste (les bons goûts) of the guitarist deems fit.

become the wife of William of Orange, succeeding to the English throne in 1688 - again connecting French guitar music to the English monarchy. The suite in G minor from the above book opens with an unmeasured prelude in the style of Louis Couperin. The suite also features three sarabandes, the middle of which, plainte, characterises the serious, even mournful nature of the music.

Five of the six pieces from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France manuscript (rés. 844) recorded here are works obviously popular enough in their day to be transcribed by an anonymous hand for the baroque guitar. Four of the pieces are orchestral in their original form; a musette by André Campra, two entrées by Lully and an air by Marin Marais from his opera Alcione, alongside a transcription of the popular harpsichord piece Sœur Monique by François Couperin. The transcriber has taken great pains to maintain the essence of the pieces whilst keeping them in an idiomatic framework. The Masquerade by Robert de Visée exists also in another manuscript version.

Such transcriptions were, of course, not the only way in which the guitarist could be a part of general musical life. As mentioned earlier, the guitar during the seventeenth century became a regular part of the basso-continuo, meaning that alongside the organ, harpsichord, and other plucked strings (lute and theorbo), the guitar was right at the heart of musicmaking.Thus, the guitar was used to accompany music ranging from the intimate solo voiced air de cour by composers such as Lambert and le Camus, through to the full scale dramatic and operatic works of Lully, Charpentier and Campra.

Henri Grénerin, as well as being a guitarist/composer, was employed, like De Visée and Corbetta, as a court musician. For Grénerin, this involved playing theorbo in the ballets de cour. The suite in D major comes from his Livre de guitarre (1680) dedicated to Lully. Once again it is an attempt to imitate Lully's style, especially in the passacailles, but with some particularly guitaristic traits.

Antoine Carré was employed by, and dedicated his Livre de pièces de guitarre de musique (c.1675) to, 'Madame la princesse d'Orange', who went on to 6