A collection of solo music played on a variety of lutes and harpsichords, including pieces by Blow, Dowland, Byrd, Froberger, Weiss, Rameau, Scarlatti and Couperin. Seven historical instruments are featured.

21 MP3 Songs in this album (68:43) !
Related styles: CLASSICAL: Early Music, CLASSICAL: Baroque



Details:
Personal Collection is a recording project that focuses attention on two important principles of music; that there is a perfect tool for the job, and that a good musician will allow the music and the perfect instrument to speak their internal dialogue. The result is a synthesis that musicians of the past experienced every day, a part of their natural inheritance. With that principle in mind, harpsichordist Susan Adams and lutenist Clive Titmuss assembled their forces, collected just the right music for each one of a group of three harpsichords and four lutes, and made a record. There are copies of a Gregori and an anonymous Italian, a later eighteenth century French harpsichord, two earlier 17th century lutes, a later eighteenth century re-built instrument and a French theorbo. It was our first recording project and it was a great success, popular with audiences and a good seller for nearly 20 years.

Clive Titmuss was born in Ilford, England in 1951, and came to Canada in 1955. He went to the University of Calgary as a musicology and guitar student and later studied the lute and related subjects in California, England and finally at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, studying under Eugen Dombois and Hopkinson Smith.

Clive co-founded the non-profit Society of Friends of Early Music Studio in Surrey, B.C. in 1987, and performs the masterworks of the lute and early guitar repertoire. Later he began to study lutherie and has built more than 100 period guitars and lutes on models from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Clive's performing work has concentrated on music by Bach, Weiss and Reusner, and especially on the lute music of the 17th century by Bittner, Vallet, Dowland, Galilei and the French school founded by the Gaultiers and Charles Mouton. He takes great pride in playing music on instruments which he has built for the purpose. Even though everything that could be done with a guitar has been done and it seems pointless, he still plays it anyway.

He has established his workshop and studio in Kelowna, overlooking Lake Okanagan in southern British Columbiaâs mountain desert country. Here, he builds stringed instruments, and does some restoration work on historic keyboard instruments â and he teaches a small number of dedicated lute and lutherie students in his studio and workshop. His recordings have been heard on radio in half a dozen countries, and his instruments are played by musicians around the world.

Susan Adams was born in Ottawa into a family that encouraged music study. She began playing at the age of five, and started taking lessons when she was six years old. Susan studied the piano privately in Ottawa with Jaromey Anderson and under Boris Roubakine at the University of Calgary, both of whom were dedicated and generous teachers.

Later she studied early keyboard instruments and related subjects with many fine musicians at the Schola Cantorum in Basel Switzerland. She majored in harpsichord with Jean-Claude Zehnder, with whom she also studied continuo and organ, and she took fortepiano lessons with Klaus Linder. Improvisation and choral singing rounded out the program. Susan especially enjoyed playing the well-maintained collection of instruments at the Schola. Travels to Holland enabled her to have coaching from Gustav Leonhardt. Returning to Canada Susan continued performing the works of Bach, Couperin, Rameau and Scarlatti on an ever-widening variety of harpsichords, and the music of Haydn, Mozart and J.C. Bach on the fortepiano and antiques.