Jenkins: Four-Part Consorts

This is the third and final volume of Phantasm’s journey through John Jenkins’ remarkable viol consort music. In many ways, the composer’s four-part music is his most miraculous, moving with mesmerising inevitability, every note seemingly in its natural place. Yet listen closely: Below the surface, each fantasy and pavan is suffused with surprising harmonic twists and polyphonic turns worthy of that other English master of 17th-century chamber music, Henry Purcell. Written in a variety of keys, the collection traverses a remarkable array of moods, from the sighing melancholy of “Fantasy No. 7 in C Minor” to the joyful yet refined “Fantasy No. 14 in D Major”. Phantasm (and guest chamber organist Daniel Hyde) have rescued Jenkins from obscurity with playing of lucidity and boundless expressiveness.