The King's Noyse, David Douglass - Royal Delight - 17th Century Ballads & Dances (1994)

This double-CD set, a budget reissue of two 1990s releases by the Chicago-based ensemble the King's Noyse, captures a sound still relatively uncommon in performances of English music from the seventeenth century: the violin band. British art demonstrates the popularity of the violin during the period listeners instinctively associate with the soberer viol consort, and music of the sort heard here moved one writer of the age to state that the violin (whose origins are only slightly younger than those of the viol) offered "High Priz'd Noise fit to make a man's Ear Glow, and fill his brains full of frisks." Frisks aside, the album offers upbeat little instrumental tunes with great titles like Trip and Go and Mr. Isaac's Maggot, with simple structures sometimes varied through elaboration in multiple iterations of a tune. The program is effectively broken up with entrancing solos for lute and cittern played by the great Paul O'Dette, and with other unusual instrumental pieces -- hear the bass violin, an often three-stringed predecessor of the cello, on Strawberries and Cream (CD 2, track 20). All the string playing is lively, accurate, and sensitively revealing of small details. Most of the composers are anonymous. There are also five vocal pieces on each of the two CDs, ballads fitted like old church hymns to tunes of the appropriate meter. Some of these, such as "Barbara Allen's Cruelty," will be familiar to folk music audiences, who can benefit from hearing the entire program -- it represents one of the layers of music that filtered down to form the Anglo-American folk repertory. The vocal works are somewhat less successful than the crack instrumental pieces; soprano Ellen Hargis is not unpleasant to listen to, but she is more concerned with maintaining a consistent, slightly plummy sound than with entering into the spirit of the often very funny texts she is singing. Those texts, reproduced on the Internet (where French and German translations are also available) rather than in the booklet, are not completely intelligible, a circumstance partly due to the over-resonant sound environment. The disc was recorded at the hall of a Jesuit retreat in Boston, not really the right choice for an evening of lusty secular entertainment. But the set as a whole is a reasonable and enjoyable low-priced choice that will fill a hole in many a collection.