KEY POINTS:
The six viol players of Fretwork are not the sort to lock themselves in a Renaissance closet; in fact, they are not afraid to venture boldly into the crossover lane. The sextet turns up on the soundtrack to The Da Vinci Code and has even played alongside Robbie Williams.
While there are few who are as adept as these musicians when it comes to pavans and galliards, they also search out the contemporary. In 1997, Fretwork's Sit Fast CD drew on commissioned pieces from the likes of Gavin Bryars, Tan Dun, Peter Sculthorpe and Elvis Costello.
Their latest collection, Birds on Fire: Jewish Music for Viols, suggests that klezmer may well have had a discreet toe-hold in the court of Good Queen Bess.
And, although the dances and fantasias by Thomas Lupo and Augustine Bassano reflect the music of John Dowland and others, perhaps these Jewish composers do have a charged melancholy all of their own.
Lupo's works include some sumptuous six-part Fantasias and the Harmonia Mundi recording has invested their sonorous yet reedy sound with an almost Brahmsian richness.
Two tracks feature Jeremy Avis, a singer whose skills with vocal big band and live-looping have taken him around the Womad and jazz festival circuits. Avis brings out the kosher beauties of two Salamone Rossi Psalms from his 1622 The Songs of Solomon. The style might be what you would expect in a standard polyphonic setting, but I found myself constantly expecting Avis to break into a flurry of cantillation.
Not surprisingly, there is political intent behind Birds on Fire, with two fascinating booklet essays revealing the discrimination that Jewish musicians suffered in 16th and 17th century England. Politics come even closer to our own times in the Orlando Gough work that provides the disc with its title.
This English composer is best known for his innovative theatre work and he casts Fretwork as a group of Jewish musicians in an Austrian holiday resort in 1939.
They slowly realise that the world is changing around them as spectral unisons morph into new and strange musical worlds, closing with the saddest of tangos.
* Fretwork, Birds on Fire: Jewish Music for Viols (Harmonia Mundi HMU 907478, through Ode Records
