One may not be too old to recall a time when, upon the discovery of the very existence of Orlando Gibbons' remarkable montage of period street cries, The Cries of London, one dashed to the University Library in haste to find a recording. This was usually followed by a sinking realization: while Gibbons' achievement was in itself astonishing, the operatic-sounding singing voices on the recordings then available didn't seem to do much justice to the more "secular" kind of expression that Gibbons was going for. Times are ...
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One may not be too old to recall a time when, upon the discovery of the very existence of Orlando Gibbons' remarkable montage of period street cries, The Cries of London, one dashed to the University Library in haste to find a recording. This was usually followed by a sinking realization: while Gibbons' achievement was in itself astonishing, the operatic-sounding singing voices on the recordings then available didn't seem to do much justice to the more "secular" kind of expression that Gibbons was going for. Times are better now indeed, as Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, and the period instrument group Fretwork have combined forces to add some precision in representing Gibbons' vision, and in the process, explores an entire sub-genre of such seventeenth century pieces in the excellent, and very attractively packaged, Harmonia Mundi release The Cries of London. In the post-modern era, we do not have street criers as we once did, the last generation of them perhaps being captured in such distant works...
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