Phantasm - Locke - Oxford Academic Early Music Journal

Leaving the choirs behind, Matthew Locke’s (c.1621/3 –1677) consort music alone has received considerably more attention than that of any works by Peerson and Amner combined. Nonetheless, on Matthew Locke: For lovers of consort music (Linn CKD 594, issued 2018, 73′) Phantasm, in collaboration with leading lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, explores the six suites of his Consort Music in Four Parts and the two suites of The Flat Consort for my Cousin Kemble. In an illuminating liner note, Laurence Dreyfus discusses Locke’s ‘ceaseless and obsessive quest for variety’, helpfully citing specific tracks that highlight the composer’s straddling of old and new musical conventions during the closing years of the Commonwealth, pushing the limits of style within a ‘tradition confident of its own “Englishness”’. The result is the ideal marriage of inventive composition and perfect realization, it being impossible to imagine more sensitive playing.