While not wishing in any way to mislead readers, I should start by saying, unequivocally, that “the less said about this release, the better”. Both the ‘passion’ and the ‘reason’ are in the listening, which is unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, opening with Machaut (the players edge on to our consciousness from the far distance) and closing among the fading cadences of Bach’s Canon per augmentationem. What emerges in between is a fastidious sequence of delights, some slow, others dance-like and with telling contrasts throughout, both in tone and harmony.
Early music melds with distant bird-song for a sweet and edifying diversion, ranging across two discs and surveying a generous host of ancient miniatures, from a busy Canon by Johann Walter to Janequin’s lively L’alouette; from Solage and the ubiquitous ‘anon’ to Robert Fayrfax and the fourteenth-century composer, Trebor. There are 28 tracks in all, with 16 named composers represented.
Sour Cream finds flautists Frans Bruggen, Kees Boeke and Walter van Hauwe, with lutenist Toyohiko Satoh, mixing and matching where ‘reason and passion’ blend, a concept that Boeke explains with the help of pertinent printed quotations from Roman and Greek philosophers and various music theorists of the period. But the theory is optional: what matters most is the music itself, whether sombre and austere as in Solage’s Fumeux fume par fumee (with added viola da gamba) or hypnotically formulaic as in Thomas Preston’s achingly beautiful (and decidedly pre-minimalist) Upon La Mi Re. Fayrfax’s That was my woe and Newark’s The farther I go summon sweet singing by Isabel Alvarez and the final sequence opens to Boeke’s own Bachian Eclipse, conceived – like everything else on the disc – in terms of order, symmetry and spirit. Both recordings and presentation are models of their kind.'