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Over the past 5 years, the music available for sackbuts and cornetts in modern edition has seemingly reached a finite quantity. Given the ephemeral nature of renaissance instrumental scoring, this quantity is apparently redundant. With this in mind we took the opportunity to take a second and third look at the specified instrumentation of a number pieces in the standard repertoire. Compositions for voices, viols and other wind instruments now, we hope, have a new colour and expressive quality made available by the dynamic employment of sackbuts and cornetts.
New editions have also sprung from our continuing exploration of repertoire and this has particularly manifested its self in the works of Giovanni Priuli, Andreas Hammerschmidt and Johann Rudolph Ahle, we hope to be giving what we believe to be the first contemporary performance of Priuli's Magnificat à 12 in the Shoreham festival 11th July 1998 and hope to give a similar performance of Hammerschmidt's Lob- und Danck leider, scored for 5 part trumpet ensemble, 5 part string band, 3 sackbuts, 5 part chorus and 4 solo voices. These exiting pieces are the start of QuintEssential Editions which we hope will bring neglected compositions and fresh interpretations of favourite standards to a wide audience.
Copyright © 2006 QuintEssential Sackbut and Cornett Ensemble |
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In the initial stages we concentrated on English music, transcribing Weep Mine Eyes by John Wilbye and the William Byrd fantasia "A lesson in voluntaries". Although we have introduced these pieces in our concert repertoire, we encountered some scepticism from hardened string player and entrenched vocalists; we would like to think that despite initial reticence we have formed a compelling argument for this kind of experimentation. We appreciate that not everything will work and these pieces which do not are seldom repeated so we have developed an empirical ear and are now able to spot unsuitable material. Our most recent success has been the "Batalha de 6. tom" by Araujo - a Spanish organ piece with it's innate idiosyncrasies.