The Southwark Consorts of Winds

On this page we present recordings of:

The Clarinet Consort - playing J.S. Bach's
Fugue in B flat

In a fugue, instruments start playing one at a time, playing the same melody but at different pitches. This melody is then heard throughout piece, in conjunction with other melodies. Instruments will drop out at various points during the piece, and then rejoin, so that the texture of the music constantly changes. The golden age of the fugue was the Baroque era, and Bach was possibly the greatest master of the genre.

The Ancient and Modern Consort - playing Paul Burnell's Five pieces for wind instruments, No. 1

Each of the movements of this piece subjects familiar musical stereotypes to simple but rather strict processes. The first movement is a march where the phrase lengths are gradually shortened. The pieces were written for Southwark Consorts of Winds.

The Ancient and Modern Consort - playing Giovanni Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, No. 1

Pergolesi was commissioned to write his Stabat Mater for a private ceremony for a group of the Neopolitan nobility. It replaced a work by Scarlatti, considered to be old-fashioned, but the new piece divided opinions, being hailed as a masterpiece and condemned as vulgar. It reflects a more directly personal form of religious devotion, and has a directness and power of emotional expression which may have seemed tasteless to people accustomed to more restrained music.