La chasse royale: keyboard manuscript of Antoine Selosse

Charlston, T. (2010) La chasse royale: keyboard manuscript of Antoine Selosse. [Audio]

Abstract

This exciting new disc is the premiere recording on disc of a newly discovered manuscript revealed to contain music attributed to Antoine Selosse by keyboard virtuoso, Terence Charlston. Discovered in a London second-hand bookshop in 2004, it is quite amazing that this seventeenth-century manuscript with a strongly recusant provenance should be discovered by Dr Peter Leech who who had previously spent eight years dedicated to researching music derived from Catholic recusant communities in the British Isles during the same period, and who continues to do so. Although it seems possible that Antoine Selosse (the Jesuit musician Antonio Mason alias Selosse, 1621-87, who was active at the English Jesuit College of Saint Omer in the 1680s) is the ‘Selos’ to whom the contents of the manuscript were attributed in the first flyleaf inscription, various factors militate against his authorship of the whole collection. The repertoire chosen for inclusion in Selosse’s remarkable book covers a broad spectrum of the genres popular in seventeenth century Europe and reveals a wide range of national influences and styles. It consists of mainly dance pieces (often with variations of their own) and these are grouped by key. Few pieces have a specific title and no composers are named but the authorship of only one piece can be stated with confidence: Bull’s popular The King’s Hunt 3 and the suites in G major (13-14) and D major (16-19) are strikingly similar, on stylistic grounds, to works by John Roberts. These pieces are performed variously on the harpsichord, organ and clavichord, and open access notes on the pieces are available at this link: http://charlston.co.uk/Selosse.htm

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