Recorder31 — Day 6
For Day 6 of Recorder31, we are delighted to share a performance from Ensemble Hesperi, inspired by their recent album, Full of the Highland Humours, which is available on their website and can be streamed on all major streaming services. This wonderful performance is of 'The Honeysuckle' by James Oswald from Airs for the Seasons (1755), and although this piece isn't on the new CD, it is very much 'full of the Highland humours'!
Performed by Mary-Jannet Leith (recorder), Magdalena Loth-Hill (violin), Florence Petit (cello) and Thomas Allery (harpsichord).
More about Full of the Highland Humours
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's, 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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