Phantasm - Locke - BBC Radio 3 'Record Review'

...released just yesterday, so too was the latest album from viol consort Phantasm, and I was wondering when they’d get around to the music of Matthew Locke as in some ways he’s the logical next step after William Lawes… Phantasm’s founder Laurence Dreyfus highlights Locke’s ceaseless and obsessive quest for variety straining for constant novelty. You can hear what he means in the C minor suite which Phantasm plays first, where Locke takes the traditional viol consort and subverts it by alternating adventurous fantasies with lighter dances and airs. Try this sequence: fantazie, saraband, fantazie and jig...

...the English jig that ends the C minor suite No. 1 from Matthew Locke’s Flat Consort for my Cousin Kemble – viol consort Phantasm and lutenist Elizabeth Kenny led by Laurence Dreyfus. So alive not just for the lightness of the dance movements but also the extraordinary harmonic twists and turns of Locke’s fantazie movements where he seems to delight in emphasising the unexpected – celebrating the grit in the oyster. The playing is everything we’ve come to expect from Phantasm and if you’ve enjoyed their recordings of William Lawes this should be next and I’m told it’s the first of a series exploring Locke’s music. They’ve borrowed the title from one of Locke’s publications “For Lovers of Consort Music” (count me in) and it’s new this week from Linn Records.