‘Full of the Highland Humours’ (EMR CD074), the debut recording from
award-winning period group Ensemble Hesperi, celebrates the immense success
Scottish music enjoyed in eighteenth-century London.
In 1700 the first known collection of Scots Tunes was printed in
London by the celebrated music publisher Henry Playford. Ever the savvy
advertiser, Playford claimed in the title that the music contained therein was
“Full of the Highland Humours”, revealing the stereotypical lens
through which many eighteenth-century Londoners saw Scotland. Just as, today,
Highland dress has become an emblem of Scotland as a whole, in the 1700s its
national music was often symbolically associated with the Highlands, a distant
and ‘exotic’ landscape where wild, pathetic melodies could be found.
Yet in reality, after the Act of Union in 1707, ambitious Scots arrived in
London in droves, bringing the music of their homeland with them, and
contributing to an increasingly diverse musical culture in the capital.
Highlights of the disc include rarely recorded works by James
Oswald, a highly successful Scottish composer who made London his ‘home
from home’ in the 1740s, presented alongside sparkling trio sonatas by
Giuseppe Sammartini, a close colleague of Oswald, and by their undeservedly
ignored contemporary, Francesco Geminiani, who admired Scottish music so much
that his ‘Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick’ featured
entirely his own arrangements of popular Scots tunes. listener on a journey to
'North Briton'. Also featured is the music of two other Scottish composers:
Thomas Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kellie, a talented aristocrat whose enthusiasm for
local music-making in Fife earned him the nickname “Fiddler Tam”,
and Robert Bremner, an enterprising Scottish publisher and composer whose
influence in London and Edinburgh helped to cement the long-held musical
relationship between the capital and Scotland itself.