Giles Farnaby is a bit neglected among English Renaissance composers for the keyboard -- something that's hard to understand, for his contemporaries apparently thought highly of his works. They appear profusely in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the preeminent keyboard publication of Elizabethan and Jacobean times. The pieces heard here -- not all of them fantasias -- are identified by their page numbers in that book, as well as a numbering from an older, partial edition of Farnaby's works. These fantasias are not the quasi ...
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Giles Farnaby is a bit neglected among English Renaissance composers for the keyboard -- something that's hard to understand, for his contemporaries apparently thought highly of his works. They appear profusely in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the preeminent keyboard publication of Elizabethan and Jacobean times. The pieces heard here -- not all of them fantasias -- are identified by their page numbers in that book, as well as a numbering from an older, partial edition of Farnaby's works. These fantasias are not the quasi-improvisatory pieces later denoted by the word but mostly free contrapuntal pieces topped off by a concluding flourish. American-Dutch harpsichordist Glen Wilson concedes in his notes that the fantasias do not represent Farnaby at his best; they generally lack the delicious shocks of John Bull's keyboard music, and there's a certain fluent quality in great keyboard music that eluded him here. That said, the music is presented with command on a replica of a booming Dutch harpsichord...
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