LeStrange Viols - Cranford: Consort Music for 4, 5 and 6 Viols (2015) [Hi-Res]

LeStrange Viols’ modern premier recording of the chamber music of William Cranford on the Olde Focus Recordings division is the first major single-composer release by an American viol consort in more than two decades.

Little is known about the life of english composer and singer William Cranford (fl. 1630s) beyond his remarkable surviving chamber music for viol consort, a Renaissance string ensemble that attracted the best English composers from William Byrd to Henry Purcell. Cranford’s music—by turns sonorous, expressive, quirky, and forward looking—represents some of finest surviving writing for the ensemble.

Cranford, or Cranforth was, according to Anthony Wood, a lay vicar at St Paul's Cathedral in the time of Charles I. He contributed two settings to Ravenscroft's 1621 Psalter, and wrote the well-known Anglican hymn tune 'Ely'. His verse anthem O Lord, make thy servant Charles, also known as The King Shall Rejoice, must have been written in the early part of the reign of Charles I, and was apparently his most popular work of this kind: it is in a simple, semi-polyphonic style. Most of his church music survives in imperfect or fragmentary form. More than twenty compositions for viols are known, many perhaps dating from the period of suppression of choral services. A total of nine three-voice catches are contained among Hilton's and Playford's publications.

LeStrange Viols presents the modern premier recording of nearly all of Cranford’s surviving works for consort, including the complete fantasias for 4, 5, and 6 viols, the substantial and virtuosic 6-part pavans (“Passamezzo” and “Quadran”), and Cranford’s distinctive 5-part setting of the In nomine and playful variations on the well-known tune “Go from my window.”

Though not as well known to modern audiences as composers William Lawes or John Jenkins, Cranford was well loved by his contemporaries. Cranford’s consort music survives in several well-traveled manuscript collections of early seventeenth-century English chamber music and was praised by writers including Anthony Wood and Dudley North, who wrote of the composer’s unique mixture of “gravity, majesty, honey-dew spirit and variety.”