‘There’s a bit of Gibbons in just about all our concerts, partly because we love him,’ says the group’s director, Mark Levy, ‘but also because we find that audiences really respond to his music, particularly the contrapuntally complex works like the In Nomines. There’s always a very prayerful, personal quality to these pieces, but they also have something very public about them.’ Like Gould, Levy is quick to make flattering comparisons. ‘Gibbons, like Bach, is a high priest of the sensual mathematics of counterpoint. He understands not only how to write fine imitative polyphony, but, crucially, how to shape it into a language in which logic and emotion are perfectly united. This is the effect you experience at the end of the five-part In Nomine No. 2, as the galloping lines arch their way to a close with a quite tangible inevitability. In concerts it’s often followed by one of those still silences in which players, audience and the spirit of the composer seem to merge into complete understanding.

‘Most performers of Gibbons feet he was something of a romantic,’ says Levy. ‘Take the fourth of the six-part Fantasias. Once you’ve heard the opening, or better still played it, you’ll never forget it, there are all these gorgeous scrunches. And the two four-part fantasias have this glowing sonority produced by their incredibly widely spaced parts, shaped by Gibbons’s original dynamic and tempo markngs (‘soft long’ and ‘away’) and punctuated by unexpected bursts of folksong.’

And where would a real romantic be without a keen literary sense? ‘Gibbons set really good texts,’ enthuses Levy, ‘unlike Byrd, who, I’m sorry to say, set mainly doggerrel. I think Gibbons had a real poetic sensibility, which is something I hope we’ve captured in the consort songs we’ve recorded with soprano Rachel Elliott.’

Compared with the austerity of many of his contemporaries, Levy finds something ‘quite feminine and shapely’ in Gibbons’s music which is always ‘brimming with good tunes’. Though, admittedly, if you look at the rather stiff portrait of the composer, ‘Gibbons looks like a bit of an organist, a bit of a briefcase, you don’t hear any of that in the music.’ Quite the opposite. In the more forward-looking pieces, and those that call for the rare ‘greate dooble base’, there’s plenty of Italian sunshine to banish the clouds of English melancholy. Gibbons’s extrovert nature is also glimpsed in the quirky passages which so often interrupt the stately progression of his more serious fantasias - echoes, perhaps, of the grotesque dances of witches and madmen which were such a popular part of the court masque.

The mainstay of ‘Royal Fantasies’ (the first of Concordia’s two Gibbons discs) are the nine supposedly ‘royal’ fantasias for three viols which, unusually for the 17th century, were published as a set, and which Concordia - also unusually - have decided to record complete and in their original order. There’s good reason for this. It has been suggested that these nine pieces may well form a mini set of ‘enigma’variations. The theme itself is never stated, of course, but a series of melodic fingerprints recur throughout the set. Mark Levy admits that the jury is still out on this appealing theory, but that when the ensemble plays them in concert ‘you feel there’s a real journey through these works. Coincidence or not, there’s definitely a feeling when you come towards the end that you’ve got something which has been broken down into its elements - just a couple of intervals - which are then played with over and over again, so the point is really hammered home.’

Another enigma is the Pavan De Le Roye, to which Mark Levy has cleverly managed to provide his own solution. Time has not been kind to the music and only three of the original five parts survive. Nevertheless the music looked interesting enough to attempt a reconstruction. ‘I spent a two-week holiday composing the two missing parts,’ says Levy. ‘It’s a shame that it had to be the treble and tenor voices that were lost because they generally carried most of the melodic interest in pieces like this. But I found that the surviving shell actually left surprisingly little room for manoeuvre. So it’s possible that I’ve achieved something quite close to the original, though, of course, we’ll never really know.’

Another novelty of their recording is Concordia’s decision to add a harpsichord to the consort. Levy is quick to justify this: ‘I see Gibbons himself at the very heart of these pieces, so there has to be a keyboard and it has to have a creative role.’ Earlier recordings by groups such as Fretwork have tended to use a chamber organ, but the 17^th-century theorist and composer Thomas Mace particularly recommends the harpsichord (Gibbons would have called it a ‘virginal’). Levy agrees. ‘Whereas the organ is a blending instrument, the harpsichord is the opposite - it’s like lemon juice, it helps bring out the flavour of the other instruments.’

And Concordia have a very distinctive flavour, too. ‘The way we play sounds totally different from other groups. I think we play in a much more horizontal way; it’s much more colouristic, and there’s a feeling for the importance of each line.’ And a particular feeling for Gibbons, too, who has been a constant thread in their development as a consort. ‘This is our coming of age recording,’ says Levy, and by ‘our’ you know he means Orlando, too.

© Gramophone October 2000