Time was when the majority of records of late medieval and renaissance music were made up of social music and above all dances, it was almost an inevitable stage in the creation of a taste for the music of the period that it was initially represented by an essentially unrepresentative aspect of its soundworld, almost as if the eighteenth century had been portrayed with Mozart's German Dances to the fore but without the opera and the piano concerto. Now all that has changed as more and more of the major works are recorded, but there is still a place for sensitively-performed selections of the lighter repertories, and the present record is an attractive example.
The inspiration for the selection itself is Respighi's three popular orchestral suites called Ancient Airs and Dances, and Paul O'Dette has carried out an interesting piece of detective work in tracking down Respighi's sources (the composer himself disguised them) to the transcriptions of the pioneering Italian musicologist Oscar Chilesotti. One of the most attractive features of the performances themselves is their varied timbre, O'Dette himself plays both the eight- and ten-course lute, archlute and even (on the final track) a baroque guitar, and Nigel North adds a bass lute to Besard's Bransles de village. The readings of these instrumental pieces are neatly tailored and graciously shaped whilst still retaining that flexibility of rhythm and tactus that are the hallmark of the style. Then, in addition, there is Rogers Covey-Crump's gentle rendering of Boesset's Divine Amaryllis, and above all his quietly elegiac account of six airs de cour by Jean-Baptiste Besard. The lightness of his tone is well suited to the mood of these pieces, and the carefully-considered improvised embellishment is a nice and appropriate touch. Finally, both violin and viol make a brief appearance in a single track, Laura soave based on the famous Ballo del Granduca from the 1589 Florentine intermedi, one of the most exploited bass patterns of its time.
All in all this is a delightful record, sensitively recorded to capture all the immediacy of these simple, domestic pieces.'