Post Description

Recorded at Wadham College Chapel, Oxford on the 15th~18th March 2009
Engineered by Philip Hobbs
Post production by Julia Thomas at Finesplice
Cover painting: ‘Hearing', 1617 (oil on panel) by Jan Brueghel, the Elder (1568-1625)
- Prado, Madrid, Spain / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Design by John Haxby
Photos of Phantasm by Hanya Chlala 

  

JOHN WARD (CA. 1589~1638) 
Consort music for five and six viols

John Ward (ca. 1589~1638) has to put up with a name of such unadorned plainness that it is hard to believe he was a leading light in Jacobean viol consort music. Though wrongly demeaned on occasion today as a mere "amateur" composer (because he didn't hold a court or ecclesiastic appointment), connoisseurs in the seventeenth century were in no doubt about his stature. Writing almost forty years after his death in 1676, Thomas Mace names ‘Mr John Ward' as one of those ‘diverse famous Englishmen' of ‘very great eminence and worth' who composed fantasies ‘as fit monuments, and patterns for sober and wise posterity, worthy to be imitated and practiced'. To judge from the far flung transmission of his instrumental works in private 
collections, Ward was indeed imitated and practiced for a good long while, though in 1676 only Purcell's final chapter in imitative consort music remained to be written some four years later after a period of intense study, perhaps even composed in response to Mace's ‘monumental' vision of the old English viol fantasy, filled with its ‘pathetical stories' and ‘divine raptures'. 

Ward's magisterial consort music for five and six viols - recorded here complete for the first time - deserves far more than a monument to sobriety and wisdom, for one encounters works which seduce the ear into a dream of lyrical temptation and wistful longing without a word having to be uttered. Unlike the more restless Orlando Gibbons (1583~1625) with his brilliant concentration of catchy phrases and quick-witted ingenuity, or even John Jenkins (1592~1678) with his balmy waves of gorgeous sound and playful metrical games, Ward projects a sense of unhurried leisure in his consorts which happily indulge in gentle forays, delighting in the way that music can rove and meander in journeys which sound far more protracted than their limited duration might suggest. If Ward's pleasant outings at first seem no more than scenic and a bit aimless, the more one submits to the composer's guiding and inviting hand, the more one warms to the oh so gentle way he prods you to move along to vistas never before glimpsed, surveying a musical landscape wholly his own. The leisure in Ward's roving harmonies is best captured in a paradox: with its obsessive love of interrupted cadences, this is music which longs for "home" while ensuring that it won't return anytime soon. As with so much great music, the pleasure lies in the certain knowledge that one will reach a desired goal while luxuriating in a tactical if languorous delay. One confronts this paradox in many of Ward's Fantasias, though in Fantasia No.6 a6 (Track 3), he takes the conceit to extreme and beautiful lengths: here the composer diagnoses how he can frustrate the return to the key (or Aire) of C major so that the sweetness of the concluding chord supplies the most satisfying and cushioned close. Another form of more overt roving occurs in the adventurous, even startling harmonic shifts of Fantasia No.1 a5 (Track 9) which glide with little seeming effort through a breathtaking succession of remote flat and sharp keys. 

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