Reviews

Four instruments that should not belong together, and four hundred years that vanish when they play: the Vervain Consort make the border between court and street sound like the invention it always was. The evening's conceit — a masque tune followed by the ballad that stole it, the ballad followed by the divisions that dressed it back up for the parlour — could be a lecture, and in other hands has been. Here it is a band showing you their favourite tunes from four angles.

The sound is the thing. Mensah's gamba and Iyer's theorbo make the courtly floor; then Whitlock's hurdy-gurdy arrives like weather, and Bankole's sackbut sings over the top with a directness no cornett could manage. When all four finally land on the same ground bass, the room leans in.

By the encore — a Playford set taken at true dancing speed, which is faster than concert speed and everyone knows it — the audience was stamping the floor of a Grade I listed hall. Nobody stopped them. That is the point of this group.

The rare early-music record that treats its sources as living tunes rather than laboratory specimens. The Ortiz recercadas are played with scholarly care and then — the record's real argument — set beside the anonymous street divisions that borrowed the same grounds, transcribed from the consort's own Dance Book. The juxtaposition flatters both.

Bellfounder's production leaves the undercroft audible around the band, which suits music that was written for rooms, not halls. The hurdy-gurdy is balanced honestly: present, grainy, occasionally rude. It would have been easy to tame it in the mix. Right that nobody did.