Consort Sets in Five & Six Parts

The English composer William Lawes (1602-1645) began his music studies with his father before being sent to London to study with John Coprario. He served at the Court of Henry, Prince of Wales, where he came into contact with the great masters of the day, such as Orlando Gibbons, Alfonso Ferrabosco, his own brother Henry Lawes, and Coprario himself, with whom he frequently played. In 1635, he was appointed "musician in ordinary for the lutes and voices" at the Court of Charles I, who dubbed him "the Father of Musick". A Royalist, he followed the prince when the Court was transferred to Oxford in 1642 and enlisted in the king's army. He fought in the civil war of 1645 and died defending a garrison in Chester that same year.
During his short career, William Lawes composed all kinds of music: vocal and instrumental pieces, religious music; he was also the most important composer of music for the theatre before Henry Purcell - it was the great age of the "masque", the official Court entertainment - and, of course, chamber music for viol consorts, which were very popular ensembles at that time. A great lover of the theatre, Lawes distinguished himself from composers of the preceding generation by introducing a dramatic quality and unusual expressiveness into consort music. Aware of the technical possibili-ties of the instruments and the new sounds that could be achieved with the consort, Lawes did not hesitate to introduce innovations in his composition: dissonance, changing textures and colour, unexpected harmonic modifications in the melodic line, conceived with a great sense of the music's architecture. These 5 and 6-part pieces exude great energy, written in the form of dance movements which compose a kaleidoscope of sounds and moods. The resulting music is sumptuous.
Tireless in his task of rediscovering English music, Jordi Savall has decided to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Lawes by offering with his ensemble Hespèrion XXI the complete Consort Sets in Five & Six Parts by this outstanding composer of the first half of the 17th century. A double CD which forms a single unified whole, allowing the listener to savour the full-bodied, voluptuous consort sound of Hespèrion XXI.

About William Lawes' Consort Sets

Lawes saved his most striking music for his favourite instrument, the viol. (…) Writing for a consort of five and six viols accompanied by organ, Lawes reinvented the lively conversational language for idiomatic string music, and by linking movements together into Setts or suite he developed chamber music on a scale never heard before in England. By expanding the palette of harmonies with a host of new dissonances, the held over notes, scrunches and tweaks that add so much flavour to this kind of music. Lawes ventured into new emotional territory as well.
Mark Levy - BBC Music Magazine (May 2002)

On 24th September, 1645, the untimely death of William Lawes at the age of 43, during the siege of Chester, prematurely deprived England of one of the most innovative and fascinating musical figures of the day. As a tribute to this brilliant composer, the too-long-forgotten "Father of Musick", we have decided to mark the 400th anniversary of his birth with a complete recording of all ten Consort Sets in Five & Six Parts.
It is undoubtedly in this collection of Fantasias, In Nomine, Arias and dance suites, conceived in the strict classical tradition of viol sets (with 5 five-part Sets for 5 viols & organ, and 5 six-part Sets performed here by 2 violins, 4 viols & organ), that the true essence of Lawes's enigmatic, impassioned and innovative art is to be found in its purest and most manifest form: inventiveness and masterly skill, boldness and discipline, sensitivity and virtuosity, poetry and passion, spirituality and sensuality, are unfailingly combined and developed with great freedom through a bold and thorough command of the expressive potential of all aspects of melody, counterpoint and harmony. William Lawes is uncompromising in his adoption of a musical discourse which, even today, surprises us with the intensity of its expressive power and its unequivocal modernity.
After more than thirty years of study and experience with the team of violists in Hespèrion XX and XXI (including research, teaching, concert performances and recordings) in the viol consort repertoire, from its origins to the last Fantasias by Henry Purcell, and particularly in our recordings of its most representative composers such as Christopher Tye, William Byrd, Anthony Holborne, John Dowland, William Brade, Orlando Gibbons, John Coprario, Alfonso Ferrabosco, John Jenkins, Matthew Locke and the great Henry Purcell, not forgetting the wonderful composers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, we have approached the interpretation of William Lawes's music with great respect and fascination, conscious above all that the composer's great daring and experimentation, evident in so many instances of his extremely audacious handling instrumental polyphony, as well as in the unique and highly individual nature of his composition, are always driven by a profound inner logic at the service of quintessential musical meaning and expression.
Like Dowland's Lachrimae, Purcell's Fantasias, Bach's The Art of Fugue, Haydn's The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross and Beethoven's last string quartets, the Consort Sets by William Lawes deserve to be known not only as one of the most original masterpieces of chamber music of all time, but, above all, because of the extraordinary beauty, poetry and passion which are articulated in their balanced interplay of fleeting sounds, melodies and harmonies, which in turn offer a precious glimpse of an exceptional spirit, a sensitive and enigmatic voice that we are only just beginning to come to know, but one which will become increasingly indispensable in the fascinating process of rediscovering an important musical past.
Jordi Savall (Viena, 30 of April 2002)