EMR CD074 | DETAILS
  EMR CD074
   
 

FULL OF THE HIGHLAND HUMOURS
   
  Ensemble Hesperi
   
  EAN 5 060263 500698

‘Full of the Highland Humours’, the debut recording from award-winning period group Ensemble Hesperi, celebrates the immense success Scottish music enjoyed in eighteenth-century London.

 

In 1700 the first known collection of Scots Tunes was printed in London by the celebrated music publisher Henry Playford. Ever the savvy advertiser, Playford claimed in the title that the music contained therein was “Full of the Highland Humours”, revealing the stereotypical lens through which many eighteenth-century Londoners saw Scotland. Just as, today, Highland dress has become an emblem of Scotland as a whole, in the 1700s its national music was often symbolically associated with the Highlands, a distant and “exotic” landscape where wild, pathetic melodies could be found. Yet in reality, after the Act of Union in 1707, ambitious Scots arrived in London in droves, bringing the music of their homeland with them, and contributing to an increasingly diverse musical culture in the capital.

 

Highlights of the disc include rarely recorded works by James Oswald, a highly successful Scottish composer who made London his “home from home” in the 1740s. Many of Oswald's compositions exhibit musical features associated with Scottish traditional music, and reveal his flair for charming melodies in the newly fashionable “galant” style. His ‘Airs for the Seasons’, four of which appear on the disc, are delightful miniatures, each named after a flower or a plant that blooms in the appropriate season. Also featured are sparkling trio sonatas by Giuseppe Sammartini, a close colleague of Oswald, and by their undeservedly ignored contemporary, Francesco Geminiani, who admired Scottish music so much that his ‘Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick’ featured entirely his own arrangements of popular Scots tunes. Oswald also made his native music work to his advantage, weaving five well-known melodies into a ‘Sonata on Scots Tunes’ which cannot fail to transport the listener on a journey to “North Briton”. Music by two remaining Scottish composers feature on the disc: Thomas Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kellie, a talented aristocrat whose enthusiasm for local music-making in Fife earned him the nickname “Fiddler Tam”, and Robert Bremner, an enterprising Scottish publisher and composer whose influence in London and Edinburgh helped to cement the long-held musical relationship between the capital and Scotland itself.

TRACK LISTING AND AUDIO EXTRACTS
     
James Oswald (1710–1769)
‘THE AIRS FOR SUMMER’
1. ‘The Poppy’: Aria — Gavotta  
       
Giuseppe Sammartini (1695–1750)
TWELVE TRIO SONATAS FOR TWO GERMAN FLUTES OR VIOLINS: SONATA VI
2. Adagio  
3. Allegro  
4. Largo  
5. Allegro  
       
Nicola Matteis (?–c. 1713)
OTHER AYRES AND PIECES FOR THE VIOLIN, BASS VIOL
AND HARPSICHORD; THE FOURTH PART
6. ‘Ground After the Scotch Humour’  
       
James Oswald (1710–1769)
‘THE AIRS FOR AUTUMN’
7. ‘The Sweet Sultan’: Siciliana — Allegro moderato — 
‘Hornpipe’ (con spirito)		  
       
‘A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF SCOTS TUNES’
8. ‘Alloway House’  
       
Thomas Erskine, Earl of Kellie (1732–1781)
SIX SONATAS FOR TWO VIOLINS AND BASS: SONATA IV
9. Andante  
10. Minuetto  
       
James Oswald (1710–1769)
‘THE AIRS FOR SPRING’
11. ‘The Ranunculus’: ‘Aria’ — Allegro — Andante — Tempo di Minuetto  
       
‘A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF SCOTS TUNES: A SONATA ON SCOTS TUNES’
12. ‘O Mother, What Shall I Do?’  
13. ‘Ettrick Banks’  
14. ‘She Rose and Let Me In’    
15. ‘Cromlit’s Lilt’  
16. ‘Polwart on the Green’  
       
Henry Playford (1657–1709)
‘A COLLECTION OF ORIGINAL SCOTCH TUNES;
FULL OF THE HIGHLAND HUMOURS’
17. ‘Peggy’s the Prettiest’ — ‘My Lady Hope’s Scotch Measure’  
       
James Oswald (1710–1769)
‘THE AIRS FOR WINTER’
18. ‘The Cyclamen’: Gratioso — Adagio — Allegro, Tempo di Minuetto  
       
Robert Bremner (1713–1789)
‘A HARPSICHORD OR SPINNET MISCELLANY’
19. ‘Maggie Lauder’  
       
Francesco Geminiani (1687–1762)
‘A TREATISE OF GOOD TASTE IN THE ART OF MUSICK’
SONATA III: ‘THE LAST TIME I CAME O’ER THE MOOR’
20. Andante  
21. Grave    
22. Allegro  
       
Robert Bremner (1713–1789)
‘A CURIOUS COLLECTION OF SCOTS TUNES WITH VARIATIONS’
23. ‘Hit Her on the Bum’  

 

REVIEWS
Beautifully shaped by Benjamin Frith... Beguiling sounds, graced by the tawny richness and unexaggerated line of Richard Jenkinson’s cello playing... The sense of purpose and sureness of line of Ian Venables’ music is pure oxygen.
EMR CD31 | BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Exquisitely rewarding... Ravishing accounts.
EMR CD029 | CHOIR AND ORGAN
This is music of great beauty and integrity and the performances fully do it justice. It would be criminal to let it pass you by.

EMR CD028 | INTERNATIONAL
RECORD REVIEW

The Bridge Quartet approach these pieces with a sympathetic and insightful warmth, and confirm their ambassadorial credentials for British chamber music. A lovely, radiant disc.
EMR CD025 | Gramophone
Duncan Honeybourne’s playing is astonishingly affectionate, yet never saccharine... Honeybourne plays with suave confidence.
EMR CD024 | INTERNATIONAL PIANO
Rupert Marshall-Luck is an ideal interpreter: generously but not effusively lyrical; agile and athletic... The warm, folk-song like slow movement is at times almost painfully beautiful, with a shimmering pastoral central section... Marshall-Luck is, again, indefatigable and keenly picks up on the work’s melancholic strain.  Finely recorded and with comprehensive booklet notes, this is a must for fans of 20th-century English repertoire.
EMR CD023 | THE STRAD