Kessler Collection
Post categories: Rick Jones
|15:57 UK time, Tuesday, 3 February 2009
The counter-tenor James Bowman and the viol consort Fretwork lent their considerable weight last Sunday to a campaign to find a permanent home for five seventeenth century bass viols, four English, one French, collectively worth just under a million pounds.
Fretwork even played them as well as their own during the concert. The ensemble sound in Ferrabosco's Fantasia for Six Basses (one of theirs had to play) had rich, dark puritan gravity in the warm acoustic of Duke's Hall at the Royal Academy of Music.
There were master craftsmen working in Purcell's England. London was to viols what Cremona became to violins. The varnish was as good as anything Stradivarius used and the carving of the faces on the ends of the scrolls of Grinling Gibbons quality. One of the makers was Barak Norman. 'You've got a face / That'll go on a bass / Barak Norman / Said to his foreman,' quoted the lutemaker sitting behind me (Michael Lowe, a friend from the Lute Society)./
The Norman viol accompanied James Bowman in Purcell's song Oh Solitude and made it one of the highlights of the year so far. Bowman's deeply expressive voice just touches the high notes. He never oversings; the haunting text by Katherine Phillips does not suggest forte delivery though that long, high C sharp at the climax is tempting. For the most part the copy hung by Bowman's side and he delivered by heart the anguish in its long, never exactly repeating melody over short, always exactly repeating bass. (I have decided to sing it myself on Shakespeare's birthday this year, at 2.30pm in Southwark Cathedral, so in answer to your question on 10 January, kleines c, yes I am.).
The five viols are part of the estate of the Zurich-born instrument maker Dietrich Kessler (1929-2007), who came to work for Arnold Dolmetsch in Kent and stayed. The idea is for the Royal Academy to house the instruments and, in time, to add to the collection prized English instruments of all periods. The amount of twelve thousand pounds raised by a raffle is the fund's starting platform. The generous prize in the raffle was a new bass viol built by an international consortium of present day makers who are all concerned that The Kessler Collection should remain a single item. They have a website - www.thekesslercollection.com - further information. The trustees describe the collection as 'a world heritage' and one would find it hard to disagree.
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