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This month is Recorder31 at The Early Music Shop, where we're celebrating all things recorder! So, we thought it fitting to feature an album with a strong recorder connection. The four-piece ensemble Ensemble Hesperi were the winners of the Young Ensemble Competition at the London International Festival of Early Music in 2020, and released their debut album "Full of the Highland Humours" last year. Visit our Recorder31 blog to read an interview with the group, or read on here to discover more about the album...
OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR AUGUST 2023
From the artist's press release…
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.
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.
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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Full of the Highland Humours":
Ensemble Hesperi are possibly best known to followers of The Early Music Shop as the winners of the LIFEM Young Ensembles Competition in 2020. The following year, they returned to Blackheath launching their album Full of the Highland Humours.See below to revisit Ensemble Hesperi's recording sessions back in 2021, and take a look behind the scenes as the album was created...
Full of the Highland Humours is in stock at The Early Music Shop now - order online or buy from our Snape Maltings showroom!