About Fretwork

Fretwork is:

Since its London debut in 1986, Fretwork has given concerts and broadcast round the world, made numerous highly successful recordings, set new standards in the performance of the great English music for viol consort, and generated a living repertory for the medium. In addition to frequent appearances throughout Western Europe, the group has visited Russia, Lithuania, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada. While many of Fretwork's audiences are already familiar with its series of Virgin Classics recordings of works by the great English composers, its repertory includes not only works from C16th and C17th Flanders, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, but also entirely new music.

After an inspirational collaboration with George Benjamin, the group have gone on to commission works from Michael Nyman, Simon Bainbridge and Thea Musgrave. In 1995 they collaborated with London's South Bank Centre to commission twelve composers to compose a modern equivalent to the nine Purcell Fantasias in four parts, the Fantasia Upon One Note, and the In Nomines in six and seven parts. The result is an astonishing array of new music, ranging from the blue melancholy of Elvis Costello's Put Away Forbidden Playthings through the wild and experimental Buzz from Barry Guy, to the installational Room Purcell by Ben Mason. More fabulous music came with Tan Dun's hypnotic A Sinking Love, Gavin Bryars' sublime six-part In Nomine, and Poul Ruders Second Set of Changes. The ensemble can now offer programmes of 5 & 6 viols with voice, entirely of the contemporary music written for them. Fretwork recorded the works by Costello, Bryars, Ruders, Bainbridge, Sculthorpe, Dun and Guy, together with the Hexachord Fantasy in 5 parts by Alfonso Ferrabosco II, Ut Heremitas Solus by Johannes Ockeghem, Sit Fast by Christopher Tye and Heinrich Isaac's O Decus Ecclesiae, on their album Sit Fast, released in September 1997. They have also performed Arvo Part's Stabat Mater with the Taverner Singers and Andrew Parrott and subsequently recorded it for EMI. The Nimbus recording of George Benjamin's Upon Silence with Susan Bickley was released in the spring of 1997.

Programmes are available for 4, 5 or 6 viols, all with or without voice, lute or organ. Repertory ranges from In Nomines and Fantasias by Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis, Robert Parsons and William Byrd, through dance music by Anthony Holborne and John Dowland (including his famous Lachrimae collection) to the grand sonority of six-part consorts to the organ by Orlando Gibbons and William Lawes, and the late flowering of the tradition in the music of Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell. Fretwork has worked closely with the countertenor Michael Chance in the fine consort song repertory and in programmes with theorbo, contrasting Henry Purcell's Fantasias with his solo songs. The consort is constantly engaged in developing both ends of this repertory of ancient music. Later this year they will be giving several concerts of Bach's Art of Fugue, and they have already commissioned the construction of a set of renaissance viols in order to explore the first music written for viols. One of the most successful ideas of recent years has been the combination of the contemporary with ancient music - indeed it is true to say that most of the concerts that Fretwork now give include some contemporary music.

Fretwork work with the leading singers for all the various types of music they perform, such as Michael Chance, James Bowman, Catherine Bott, Emma Kirkby, Susan Bickley, Paul Agnew, John Potter & Richard Wistreich. The tenth anniversary concert in The Wigmore Hall, London was held in October 1996 featured an appearance by Elvis Costello, as well as Emma Kirkby (who sang A Sinking Love by Tan Dun) and Deborah Miles-Johnson, who sang Upon Silence with the composer conducting.

Soon after its formation, Fretwork began a major series of recordings for Virgin Records which has been widely acclaimed and has introduced the repertory to a far wider audience than ever before. Though not all are still available in their original format, many have been recoupled or issued in anthologies. Their recording of Dowland's Lachrimae (1604) was was awarded the French Grand Prix du Disque in Paris in 1997. The last of their releases for Virgin Classics was Celestiall Witchcraft, which features the Private Music of Henry and Charles, Princes of Wales. It includes music by Lupo, Gibbons, Ferrabosco II, Coprario, William Lawes & Monteverdi, with Mark Padmore (tenor), Paul Nicholson (organ), Nigel North and William Carter (theorbos). This was launched at a special study day at the new British Library on January 30th, marking the 350th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and was voted 'Editor's Choice' in the June 1999 Gramophone. Fretwork has also collaborated in several recordings on other labels with many and varied artists. Amogst these was a recording of Gavin Bryars' Cadman Requiem with the Hilliard Ensemble for Point Music, which was released in late 1998. They also performed this piece in a memorable concert before an audience of over 1500 in Westminster Cathedral on December 22nd 1998, marking the 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster.

On October 4th 1999 they took part with Michael Chance in the Sounding the Millenium festival promoted by the BBC, in a concert in Norwich Cathedral, at which they gave a first performance of a new work Nipson written for them by John Tavener. In autumn 2000 Fretwork began a creative collaboration with the innovative French dance company Castafiore. Working together with the artistic director Karl Bisquit they contributed to the creation of the music/thatre/mime piece Recits des tribus Omega which has already had several highly successful performances in Mulhouse, Chateauvallon, Annecy, Paris, Niort, Grenoble, Lyon and Noisy. Performances continued throughout 2001, 2002 and 2003.

In autumn 2001 they undertook one of their most ambitious and spectacular projects: a major tour for the Contemporary Music Network. Together with Michael Chance (countertenor), Nicholas Daniel (oboe), choreographer Ian Spink, dancers Lucy Burge and Sarah Fahie and a full lighting design team, all acknowledged experts in their different fields, Fretwork presented the Hidden Face Tour. Performances took place in magnificent spaces such as Gloucester Cathedral, St Mary-in-the-Castle in Hastings, Lancaster Cathedral, Bristol Cathedral, the Union Chapel in London, Sheffield Cathedral and Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. New works were written for the tour by Orlando Gough and John Woolrich and were performed alongside pieces by John Tavener (an arrangement of "The Hidden Face" made specially for the group), Tan Dun, Andrew Keeling and Michael Nyman. Nyman's "Self-laudatory Hymn of Inanna and her omnipotence" sets a boastful text - the accompanying score is the most forceful yet written for viols in consort (Fretwork is proud that at its premiere the Times critic assumed that their normally quiet instruments had been amplified - wrong). Poems by Sylvia Plath and Li Po inspired Keeling and Dun, each suffused with moonlight, but hemispheres apart in atmosphere. Dun's is an exercise in gestural writing for the viols, very precise minimalist bow-strokes hinting at acoustic calligraphy, or the discipline of the percussionists who accompany Noh theatre.

This June saw another major project, assisted by a grant from the Arts Council: Tears and Cries. 2004 was the 400th anniversary not only of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, but also of the appearance of one of the most enigmatic musical publications in England: John Dowland's Lachrimae. An "Anatomy of Melancholy" in music? Or the "Penitential" tears of a secret Catholic seeking employment at court in Protestant England via the sympathies of an immigrant Queen Consort (Anne of Denmark)? These are but two of many attempts to pin down Dowland's motivation for composing the powerful sequence of "passionate pavans" which derive from his emblematic lute-song "Flow my tears", and certainly the sombre scoring for a solo lute in consort with five low-pitched viols is made in Dowland's scheme to encompass passages both of deep melancholy and transcendent beauty. The song's imagery of night, shadows, darkness becomes almost palpable in the first half of the Lachrimae sequence, yet gradually lightens towards the close. This long night's journey into day seems to find a perfect frame in Orlando Gibbons's Cries of London, a diptych of two "In Nomines" for five viols overlaid - sometimes comically, sometimes pathetically - with the daytime sounds of London's street-markets, mendicants, tradesmen and river-taxis - "will you go with a pair of oars?". These two masterpieces by Dowland and Gibbons made up the second half of our programme. Gibbons was by no means the only Jacobean composer to enjoy eccentric combinations of the sublime and the everyday. Richard Deering presents us with another pair of sound-pictures in his City and Country Cries. The latter in particular introduces us to a Breughelesque cast of bumkins (beekeepers included) - inhabitants of the Borsetshire of Shakespeare's day. And Cobbold's 'New Fashions' ingeniously weaves into this tableau a selection of the most popular ballads of the day from 'Browning' to 'Greensleeves'. Fretwork particularly wanted in this programme to present as rich and varied a picture as possible in what might be called the 'chamber music' forms of the period. Choosing pieces which require the heights of instrumental virtuosity, as in Lachrimae, and a fine blend of polyphonic precision and theatrical bravura, as in the cries, clearly required performers of exceptional ability and hence the desire to work with the best artists in these fields: Paul Odette, widely acknowledged as today's greatest lutenist, and Paul Hillier's 'Theatre of Voices'.

In October 2004 Fretwork toured the United States with the distinguished soprano Emma Kirkby with a programme of consort songs and instrumental consorts by William Byrd. Venues included Austin, Seattle, Milwaukee, Gambier, Houston, Boston and New York, and in January 2005 they repeated the same programme in a Dutch Early Music Network tour.