Indiscretion 18th-century national music from Scotland and Ireland – Reels and jigs etc The Curious Bards Harmonia Mundi HMM905327 67:24 mins
The Curious Bards’ first album, Ex-tradition, was a medley of Irish and Scottish Baroque music, and its success has prompted them to make this new recording of popular songs and dances of the 18th-century Gaelic repertoire. Armed with flute, harp, harpsichord, smallpipes, viola da gamba, Baroque violin, zittern and a mezzo-soprano this chamber group has now mined libraries in England, Scotland and Ireland to produce a dizzy array of dances, ballads, love songs and laments of which only one melody is familiar to me. That is Huntingtone Castle, played here on the viola da gamba and flute, and made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s great film Barry Lyndon.
The musicians’ description of this music as ‘new treasures waiting to be unearthed’ is indeed warranted. After a while a diet of jigs and reels can get a bit samey, but there is also much variety to be savoured, and it’s all excellently played, generating the convivial intimacy of performance in a lost age. The liner notes indicate the political background of many of the Scottish numbers, some of them Jacobite songs which could get those who sang them exiled or even executed. And if you want to know the rhythm of a slip jig or a strathspey dance, you’ll find out here. It’s a pity no texts are provided for the songs.
Michael Church