Welcome home Walter Raleigh

The American blogs have been poking gentle fun at the parochial writing in the Penguin Guide to CDs. Well, the new edition of the competing Gramophone Guide clearly hasn't reached the land of the Pilgrim Fathers yet. Last night I came across this review of Carole Cerasi playing Thomas Tomkins' keyboard works:

But though about as fashionable as a 'Welcome home, Walter Raleigh' hat, these pieces have a quality to them - showing by turns something of the exuberance of Bull and the eloquence of Byrd - that's more than enough to maintain their currency today. This disillusioned early version of a Daily Telegraph reader was nothing less that the last representative of that great school of keyboard composers known as the English virginalists, and more than 350 years on, it matters not a bean to the listener which decade he was writing in.

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If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Diary for evening of 12th May 2005

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