Featuring ambitious and accomplished music for voices and viols, ‘Ward: Fantasies & Verse Anthems’ offers a privileged glimpse of a special moment in English music history. The four-part viol fantasies show a fluent and skillful style exemplifying Jacobean consort fantasy at its best. The Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, Emily Ashton and Christopher Terepin join Phantasm to perform Ward’s verse anthems that contain an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of textures and generous word painting amidst a polyphonic swirl of viols. This recording is a fitting tribute to John Ward, whose efforts have been rediscovered in our own time and whose mellifluous music deserves a closer look. The award-winning ensemble has been applauded across the globe for its moving performances and is recognized as the most exciting viol consort active on the world scene today. Critics have described their performances and recordings as 'intoxicating', 'revelatory', 'electrifying', and ‘interpretations pervaded by a truly burning spirit'.

Phantasm adds to its critically-acclaimed repertory of English viol consort music with the first recording in what will be a series exploring the music of Matthew Locke. A turbulent musical personality, Locke has much to endear him to ‘lovers of consort music’; his ceaseless and obsessive quest for variety ensures music of maximum breadth and diversity. Director Laurence Dreyfus has created an intriguing programme that showcases Locke’s rule-bending approach featuring music that is in turn quirky and humorous, lyrical and sweet. Most excitingly, this release reunites the partnership of Phantasm and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, whose last album together, Dowland: Lachrimae or Seven Tears, won both a Gramophone Award and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année. Locke’s part-writing, and the oftentimes orchestral dimension of his approach, are both highlighted by the opulent realization of the continuo part, devised here with supreme inventive powers by Kenny.

Originally released on Avie, the viol consort Phantasm’s ‘Four Temperaments’ is now part of Linn’s ECHO re-issue series. Representing the golden age of Elizabethan England are four distinct musical personalities - or ‘temperaments’ - the dissonant Robert Parsons, the cool Ferrabosco the Elder, the warm and sanguine Thomas Tallis, and the polar opposites of ecstasy and melancholy of William Byrd. Critics have described the award-winning ensemble’s performances and recordings as 'intoxicating', 'revelatory', 'electrifying' and ‘pervaded by a truly burning spirit'.

"This release heralds a new association between Opus Arte and the Magdalen College Choir, Oxford, under its director, Daniel Hyde Dietrich Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri is considered to be the first Lutheran oratorio Renowned soloists include John-Mark Ainsley and Robin Blaze Features Gramophone Award-winning instrumental group Phantasm"

In this new recording Phantasm make no excuses for arranging some of Bach’s remarkable keyboard music for a consort of viols. Led by director Laurence Dreyfus they go on a conscious mission to uncover the hidden riches concealed behind the more neutral resources of the harpsichord and organ so as to liberate the fascinating characters lurking in the shadows and behind the scenes within Bach’s individual polyphonic lines. In the process of fugal confrontation among three to six musicians, they come face to face with the astounding psychological insights of Bach’s most radical inventions. Drawn chiefly from the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Musical Offering and the Clavier-Übung III, the repertoire chosen for this recording has an uncanny way of forging Bach’s links with the old English traditions of the Fantasy and In nomine as much as leaping forward into a chromatic twelve-tone world where the raw emotions of expressionist modernism become not only audible but adventurously relevant. A second installment of The Well-Tempered Consort is already planned for 2021.

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REVIEWS:

As you would expect, the playing here is expressive while not being unidiomatic. Phrasing and the balancing of voices is a delight throughout, and this is reflected in a recording that allows the ear to follow any of Bach’s contrapuntal voices with ease. If you love the viol sound then you will relish this recording and, like me, be looking forward to future volumes.

– MusicWeb International

The most compelling reason to play Bach’s most densely wrought instrumental music on the viol is because it sounds fresh and appealing. Bach’s contrapuntal achievements sparkle in the hands of Phantasm.

– American Record Guide

This is the third and final installment of the Well-Tempered Consort series (5 Diapasons, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, BBC Music Magazine Chamber Choice). In this program devised by its director Laurence Dreyfus, the viol consort Phantasm continues to shine new light on the fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier interspersed with some of the composer’s most harmonically adventurous experiments from the Clavierübung III. This polyphonic feast also includes two works from the Inventions and Sinfonias as well as the Fantasia in G major BWV 572, or Pièce d’orgue as it is sometimes called, which boasts an extraordinary closing pedal point. A fitting end to a remarkable journey!

In his Four-Part Consorts, John Jenkins (1592–1678) parades his much-vaunted contrapuntal prowess that is marked by a fanatical devotion to the equality of four independent parts. Frequently turbulent and given to frenetic activity, this music charts the interactions of a band of like-minded spirits obsessed with lively struggle and restless soul-searching. The incessant peregrinations of Jenkins’s roving harmonies are heady stuff and make moments of calm and valediction all the more deserved and poignant. This recording brings to fruition Phantasm’s long-standing project to issue Jenkins’s complete consorts for four to six viols complemented by ‘Jenkins: Six-Part Consorts’ and ‘Jenkins: Five-Part Consorts’ (both released by Linn). In over half of the four-part pieces, the viols are joined by organist Daniel Hyde whose sensitive shaping of original accompaniments on a fruity seventeenth-century-style instrument helps nurture Jenkins’s grandiose ambitions.

The Art of Fugue is Bach's final composition and one of his most challenging. In this album Phantasm and it's director Laurence Dreyfus showcase all the hidden beauties of the composer's magnum opus, arguably the pinnacle of the fugue genre. Printed in open score, the format allows a rendition on viols, as recorded here. Brimming with rich counterpoint and dynamic conversation among the parts, the work can legitimately claim a place within the consort repertoire. Bach manages to paint a finely delineated set of contrasting musical portraits full of revelations and surprises. Far from an academic encyclopaedia of arcane musical techniques, The Art of Fugue thus embarks on a (unfinished) voyage of discovery shared by an inveterate explorer whose thirst for invention knows no bounds. Organist Daniel Hyde performs four movements in this welcome follow-up to Phantasm's acclaimed Well-Tempered Consort series.

In this recording, the expert violists of Phantasm return to the unconventional yet brilliant polyphonist Matthew Locke. Under the guidance of Laurence Dreyfus, Phantasm presents the second half of Locke’s Little Consort, composed for treble, tenor and bass viol, and pairs it with three suites from the Flat Consort for my cousin Kemble whose unusual grouping comprises treble and two bass viols. Both sets are accompanied by a chordal bass instrument, in this instance the leading theorbo player Elizabeth Kenny. Locke’s experimental, not to say libertarian, impulse pervades the works, and yet the composer remains grounded in the traditional ethos of strict counterpoint, standing as one of the last champions of the once treasured great polyphonic tradition. More than 400 years later, his music remains as fresh as ever.