There’s something grounding about the ground bass. Its reassuring repetition can be meditative and mesmeric. It provides a solid footing for the most florid harmonic and melodic material, which one can read against its foundations, registering with renewed pleasure every variation. No wonder it’s one of the oldest musical formulas in existence. Here, doyenne of the recorder Michala Petri and Japanese baroque harpist Marie Nishiyama present their own variation on the recorder-and-harp recital, with a century-spanning program recorded just prior to Covid lockdown in the serenity of the Chichibu Muse Park, Tokyo.
Unlike, say, Stefan Temmingh and Margret Koell’s edgier ‘Sound Stories’ (Accent), ‘On a Ground’ is predominantly given over to music, from the Renaissance to our own time, that is attractive, direct and, dare one say, eminently relaxing. The tensions are generated through contrast alone – in dynamics, tempo, pitch and register (Petri of course plays a range of recorders) and timbre – rather than stylistic extremes. The works by Carr, Farinel and Ortiz, grounded as they are in earlier styles, therefore sing in both sympathy and counterpoint with the Bach and Marcello arrangements as much as with Satie’s three Gymnopédies.
Paradoxically, perhaps, it’s in guitarist and lutenist Lars Hannibal’s four contemporary works, originally written for guitar and recorder, where this combination of instruments and performers comes into its own. The instruments get equal billing, and as we move gently through the impressionistic Dreams and Sunset Dance and the more ‘grounded’ Twilight on a Ground and Waves on a Ground, we’re able better to savour the evocative, delicately rendered individual colours with which Petri and Nishiyama fill their collective sound palette.
A gorgeous release, accessible to the neophyte yet with ample artistry and aesthetic sophistication to attract the aficionado.