Given his famous parentage -- his father Orlando Gibbons, died when he was ten -- it's a bit hard to understand why the music of Christopher Gibbons has remained so obscure. The pieces included on this release by the Academy of Ancient Music are all receiving their recorded premieres, and few other recordings of Gibbons' music exist. It's not that Gibbons was obscure in his own time; he was the first organist appointed at Chapel Royal after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660. Director Richard Egarr, in his own ...
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Given his famous parentage -- his father Orlando Gibbons, died when he was ten -- it's a bit hard to understand why the music of Christopher Gibbons has remained so obscure. The pieces included on this release by the Academy of Ancient Music are all receiving their recorded premieres, and few other recordings of Gibbons' music exist. It's not that Gibbons was obscure in his own time; he was the first organist appointed at Chapel Royal after the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660. Director Richard Egarr, in his own annotation, said that Gibbons "is the missing musical link between the pre-Commonwealth world of William Lawes and the Restoration baroquerie of Henry Purcell." That makes things sound more cut-and-dried than they are, but it does point to the mixture of styles present in the younger Gibbons' output. In keyboard music, especially, dramatic changes took place between the first and final thirds of the 17th century. Egarr does very well with the small-ensemble organ performance in the...
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