Matthew Locke: The Little Consort – Combative English composer gets stiff upper lippish treatment

Much of the life of English composer Matthew Locke (1621-77) is only patchily documented. Generations of schoolboys and sentimental lovers will be glad to know that two firm dates of his early life are known through carvings he made in Exeter Cathedral of his name (in 1638) and his initials (in 1641).

His combative behaviour was like that of a 21st-century social media troll. When his setting of the Ten Commandments was, as Samuel Pepys put it, “spoiled in the performance”, Locke got his own back by publishing the music under the astonishing title Modern Church-Musick Pre-accus’d, Censur’d, and Obstructed in its Performance before his Majesty. The printed introduction to his Little Consort of Three Parts rails against “Thick-skull’d or Fantastical conceits” and “Mountebanks”, and also takes pot-shots at foreign composers and country fiddlers.

The Suites are all of dance movements which delight in melodic freedom and harmonic unpredictability presented within familiar containers as “Pavans, Ayres, Corantes and Sarabands, for Viols or Violins ... To be performed either alone or with Theorbo’s and Harpsecord”.

The viol consort Fretwork are joined by Sergio Ucheli (archlute and theorbo) and Silas Wollston (harpsichord) in sensitive, slightly stiff upper lippish performances, inviting the ear to seek out the music’s quirkiest details rather than drawing attention to them.