Search - Suzanne van Soldt Manuscript Anonymous, Les Witches, Sébastien Wonner :: Manuscrit Susanne van Soldt

Period riffs to please modern ears

Orgelbear | 10/22/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Susanne van Soldt was a teenager when her Protestant family left Antwerp to escape persecution during the Spanish invasion of the Netherlands. Among the items that Susanne took to the family's new home in London was a manuscript, dated 1599, in which she kept keyboard reductions of popular dances and psalm tunes. Susanne would have played the pieces in this book (now in the British Library) on the virginal. (This approach is taken by Guy Penson for his virginal performances of the MS on a Ricecar CD.) But the period ensemble Les Witches use the manuscript as a starting point to recreate fleshed-out ensemble performances based on depictions of domestic and public musicales by Brueghel and Vermeer. The instruments seen in the paintings inspired this CD's colorful instrumental palette, which includes violin, lute, bagpipes, virginal, cabinet organ, and percussion. Les Witches play most of the selections as the kind of spirited, rhythmically vibrant improvisations that would have been heard in musical get-togethers of the day. In a few instances, the musicians use the simple Psalms in the manuscript as reason to include well-known period elaborations of the tunes, for example van Eyck's recorder variations on Psalm 9 and Sweelinck's lute version of Psalm 23. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how accurately Les Witches may have recreated a 17th-century sound or Susanne's book, because these lusty, ebullient performances are a delight from beginning to end."