At the core of this disc is an attractive collection of sonatas for bassoon and continuo that, although recorded before and well known to bassoonists, are unlikely to be familiar in more general circles. The two main featured composers both enjoyed the patronage of high-status individuals: John Ernest Galliard was a court musician to Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne, and Louis Mercy was briefly in the service of James Brydges, Earl of Carnarvon (later Duke of Chandos), who famously boasted both Handel and Pepusch among his musicians at Cannons in Middlesex.
Galliard, a native of Celle in Saxony who had studied in Hanover, was well established as a London theatre composer by the time John Walsh published his Six Sonatas for the Bassoon or Violoncello with a Thorough Bass for the Harpsichord in 1733. Mercy seems to have led a more precarious existence as a performer on the oboe and recorder, and the appearance of his VI Sonate a Fagoto ò Violoncello col’ Basso Continuo . . . Opera Terza in about 1735 perhaps suggests that the Frenchman saw opportunity in a market already tried by Galliard. The language of Mercy's title page – and the Italianization of his name (followed in the liner notes to the present disc) – was of course not uncommon for English sonata publications, lending the publication a veneer of authenticity in the face of competition from native Italian works. Indeed, both Galliard's and Mercy's sonatas align well with the post-Corellian style familiar from so many English sets of sonatas for wind instruments, for example, those for recorder by William Croft and John Christopher Pepusch, or later by William Williams and William Topham – or indeed William Babell's oboe sonatas. Thus most of the eight sonatas included on this disc (four each by Galliard and Mercy) follow up an opening slow movement with a series of between two and four binary movements, some of which carry dance titles ranging from the familiar allemanda and sarabanda to the more colourful ‘Hornpipe a l'Inglese’ that provides the delightfully vigorous penultimate movement of Galliard's Sonata I in A minor (track 30). Alla Ciciliana seems to have been a favourite manner for Galliard, while Mercy ventures an intriguing ‘Larghetto (ala Scotseza)’ (Sonata I in B flat major, third movement; track 12) whose Caledonian credentials nevertheless seem to extend little further than its fashion-conscious heading.
Composing for the bassoon has its own peculiar challenges, of course, not least in relation to the similarity of range between the solo instrument and melodic member(s) of the continuo ensemble. Galliard in particular shows an imaginative response to the task, making adept use of compound melody to allow the soloist to switch seamlessly between participation in the bass line and more soloistic writing (whether virtuosic passagework or expressive cantabile lines). In the process he imaginatively exploits the rapid shifts of register so idiomatic to writing for the bassoon, even in such early examples of solo repertoire for the instrument. All of these features can be heard in abundance in the second track on the disc (the second movement of Galliard's Sonata II in G major, Vivace) – a track which also exhibits Jennifer Harris's characterful and spirited playing at its best, ably supported by some exuberant strumming on Andrea Baur's lute in the repeats.
Interspersed among the sonatas are six instrumental realizations of songs taken from the 1756 compendium Apollo's Cabinet: or The Muses Delight, a large collection of songs by numerous composers of widely varying accomplishment, the notable feature of which is its typesetter's idiosyncratic decision to place key signatures only at the start of the first system of each song. (A style later regretted, perhaps, to judge from the long-winded and defensive explanation of this feature printed on the verso of the title page!) The theme of ‘foreign composers in Britain’ is thereby continued, with the addition of John Frederick Lampe, another Saxon, to their number. Surprisingly, no mention is made in the liner notes of the fact that Lampe was himself a bassoonist, though no solo music for the instrument survives from his hand. The inclusion of two song arrangements on this disc might have helped fill this lacuna – after all, though for the most part shorter, both are similar in design to the binary airs of the sonatas by Galliard or Mercy – though in the event the performers instead take the opportunity to introduce contrast of timbre: ‘The Solitary Relief’ (track 9) features a quirky lute-and-pizzicato-violone repeat, while ‘The Maid's Request’ (track 14) is attractively performed by Evelyn Laib in a setting for solo harpsichord, with a nicely paced and stylistically persuasive increase in both textural elaboration and melodic ornamentation as the piece progresses.
Apart from one more song by Galliard, the remaining three tracks tap into the Scottish vein hinted at in Mercy's Sonata I – again via Apollo's Cabinet, where all three ‘Scottish Traditional’ tunes are erroneously ascribed (as was common in the eighteenth century) to David Rizzio (c1525–1566), the valet de chambre and later French secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots who was accused of being her lover and notoriously stabbed to death in the Queen's presence. Whichever eighteenth-century musician really did arrange these songs was clearly not sufficiently skilled to accommodate their modal peculiarities to the then-contemporary tonal idiom, producing at times an odd effect. (A cynic might resort to such an explanation in relation to Harris's decision to record ‘The Flower of Edinburgh’ (track 18) unaccompanied, though the effect proves highly attractive regardless.)
Ensemble Chameleon give a convincing account of this appealing repertoire, working hard to ensure that the disc's consistencies of idiom and genre are suitably offset by contrasts of timbre and mood. At times, the changes can be difficult to keep up with, coming within sonatas and even in the course of a movement: in the second movement (Allegro e Spiritoso) of Galliard's Sonata V the performers go as far as to divide the solo part up between the bassoon, cello and lute, with the full ensemble combining to support exciting concitato semiquavers; this is followed immediately by an Alla Ciciliana in which Harris's plaintive solo line is accompanied solely on the lute. If such variety cannot always be practicable in live performance, the group are nevertheless to be commended for so skilfully exhibiting the versatility of this music and maintaining such a high standard of ensemble playing in the process. Even against this background, furthermore, the emotional and tonal range of Harris's playing are impressive throughout.
The concise liner notes combine helpful context with a degree of autobiographical musing on the part of Harris as to the similarities between her situation as a British musician settled in Germany on the one hand, and on the other the situations of the many eighteenth-century expatriate composers who settled in London. Most intriguing, though, is a reference to the target market for the sonatas featured on the recording: ‘the ordinary amateur bassoonist’ (6). The reference to such a species in the early eighteenth century may seem surprising, for all that sonatas for other instruments – the recorder, violin, flute and (later) the cello – were clearly aimed at the amateur market. I for one would have been interested to read more about the likely performers of these works beyond professional wind players such as Lampe, Galliard and Mercy; where, for instance, did Galliard find enough players to mount his ‘new Concerto Grosso of twenty-four Bassoons, accompanied by Signor Caporali on the Violoncello’ in his Lincoln's Inn benefit concert on 11 December 1744 (Daily Advertiser, Wednesday 5 December, 1744)? This must have been quite a spectacle, and on the strength of Galliard's sonatas it may also have been of considerable musical interest (regrettably, the music does not survive). Be that as it may, the performance seems unlikely to have been of the standard of the disc under review here. I would recommend the latter heartily as a refreshing companion to the much more numerous recordings of similar music for violin, flute or oboe.
