After Dark: A Midnight Fantasia

£16.10

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Despatch Information

This despatch estimate is based on information from both our own stock and the UK supplier's stock.

If ordering multiple items, we will aim to send everything together so the longest despatch estimate will apply to the complete order.

If you would rather receive certain items more quickly, please place them on a separate order.

If any unexpected delays occur, we will keep you informed of progress via email and not allow other items on the order to be held up.

If you would prefer to receive everything together regardless of any delay, please let us know via email.

Pre-orders will be despatched as close as possible to the release date.

Label: Harmonia Mundi

Cat No: HMM902765

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 27th February 2026

About

Pierre Gallon’s new programme portrays a night of music, hovering between fantasies and poetic dreams of the English Renaissance. His keyboards – harpsichords, a virginal and a toy piano – create a mosaic of nocturnal visions, interspersed with the fantastic and unexpected. As a contemporary counterpoint, Bernard Foccroulle’s Night (2023) reveals the light of a new dawn.

Sound/Video

Paused

1

Anon.: Like as the Lark within Merlion’s Foot [virginal-muselaar]
2

Philips: Pavana Doloroso Tregian [hpd]
3

Philips: Galiarda Dolorosa [hpd]
4

Anon.: O Death Rock Me Asleepe [hpd]
5

Holborne: The Night Watch [hpd]
6

Byrd: The Bells [toy piano]
7

Edwards: In Goinge to my Naked Bedde [virginal-muselaar]
8

Bull: Bulls Goodnighte [hpd]
9

Dowland: A Dream [virginal-muselaar]
10

Anon.: Uppon La Mi Re [hpd]
11

Byrd: The Ghost [hpd]
12

Dowland: Mr. Dowland’s Midnight [hpd]
13

Foccroulle: Night (2023) [virginal-muselaar]
14

Philips: Echo l’aurora [hpd]
15

Byrd: Prelude [hpd]
16

Bull: Fantasia, MB15 [hpd]
17

Philips: Bonjour mon cueur [hpd]
18

Bull: Fantasia, MB12 [hpd]
19

Anon.: The Gannet Pavan [virginal-muselaar]
20

Anon.: Galliard [virginal-muselaar]
21

Dowland: Go Nightly Cares [hpd/toy piano]

Europadisc Review

There is something both calming and haunting about the English musical penchant for the ground (or ostinato) bass. The best-known exponent of this technique is Henry Purcell, but well before him, in the 16th century, several composers had tapped into its expressive potential. That combination of the comforting and the unsettling is one of the key components of a new album from French harpsichordist Pierre Gallon on the Harmonia Mundi label. Entitled ‘After Dark’, it presents Gallon’s own version of ‘an English night’: not necessarily historically fastidious, but rather phantasmagorical, drawing on the sonic potentials of four different keyboard instruments.

In a repertoire drawn chiefly from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, he deploys a virginal-muselar (a version of the oblong yet harpsichord-like virginals, with a right-of-centre keyboard placement), two 17th-century-style harpsichords (one Flemish, the other Italian), and – intriguingly – a 1960s-style toy piano. The latter is used, not in the sole 20th-century work on the programme (the newly-composed Night by Bernard Foccroulle), but to great effect in William Byrd’s The Bells, where the striking of its metal rods is uncommonly effective in evoking the ringing of church bells as playfully refracted through the composer’s fecund imagination.

The recital is organised to trace a journey from dusk to dawn and a new day, encompassing the anxieties, fears and dreams that are both specific to the turbulent turn of the 16th-century at a time of religious and political turmoil, and (in many senses) universal. It combines original keyboard works and Gallon’s own transcriptions and arrangements of songs, consort suites and lute pieces, and opens with his arrangement of the anonymous Like as the Lark within Merlion’s Foot. This introduces us immediately to the woody, fluty sound of the virginal-muselar, at once beguiling and spectral. Also in this opening ‘Before Darkness Falls’ sequence are a pavane and galliard by the Catholic English composer Peter Philips, composed for a a Cornish patron before Philips’s exile to the Spanish Netherlands, and the immersive, anonymous O Death Rock Me Asleepe based on a poem said to be penned by Anne Boleyn shortly before her execution in 1536 (she may even have been responsible for the bass pattern on which it is ‘grounded’). All three are performed on the harpsichord.

The next section, ‘At Nightfall’, opens with a harpsichord arrangement of Anthony Holborne’s breezy consort almain The Night Watch, before the tolling of a bell introduces what else but Byrd’s The Bells. Richard Edwards’s setting of In Going to my Naked Bedde returns us to the sound of the virginal-muselar, its original references to the disturbed night of a sleep-deprived mother somewhat mollified by the instrument’s wonderfully intimate sonority. The sparkling Bulls Goodnighte is the first of three pieces on the programme by the English virginalist and organist John Bull, driven into exile not for doctrinal reasons but for the rather earthier transgression of adultery.

Night itself is introduced by a transcription of John Dowland’s lute piece A Dream, and it is in this central section of the programme that the rich array of sonorities so skilfully presented by Gallon’s sensitive playing cast their most magical spell. There is indeed a lute-like quality to the timbre of this particular piece, as there is to the underpinning bass pattern of Uppon La Mi Re (attributed to Thomas Preston). Byrd’s The Ghost, however, is an altogether brighter affair, suggesting that the range of characteristics attributed to phantasms in the late 16th century was much broader than we imagine today.

Mr Dowland’s Midnight, although played on a brightly-registered harpsichord, has that melancholic feel (underscored by well-judged rubato) so characteristic of its composer. It leads directly into Foccroulle’s Night (composed at Gallon’s request in 2023), which combines references to Indian classical music and a striking exploitation of meantone (unequal) temperament which brings out the purity of minor thirds but produces some alarmingly unequal chromatic sequences. This piece, with its exploitation of the harpsichord’s different registral extremes, seems to penetrate the heart of our nightly fears and dreams.

It is followed like a piercing ray of dawn sunshine by Peter Philips’s keyboard arrangement of Luca Marenzio’s madrigal Ecco l’aurora, while his version of Lassus’s French chanson Bonjour mon cueur is preceded by a Prelude by Byrd and a Fantasia by Bull which evoke the waking soul’s adjustment from the nocturnal world to the dawn of a new day. The recital’s final section, ‘Go Nightly Cares!’ opens with another of Bull’s Fantasias, and then come the anonymous but singularly rousing Gannet Pavan and Galliard, their pointed rhythms tapping into a refreshing sense of renewed energy.

The programme ends, however, with a highly imaginative arrangement of Dowland’s melancholic Go Nightly Cares, the main musical substance (played on the harpsichord) superimposed with unsettling interjections from the jarringly distinctive toy piano. It’s a remarkable end to a hugely compelling recital, boldly conceived and delivered, and recorded with an ideal combination of warmth and focus that brings out the sheer range of sonorities from these different keyboards. Even if harpsichord music isn’t normally your ‘thing’, we urge you to give this disc a spin: its combination of historical atmosphere and unsettling immediacy is remarkably involving, and Gallon, Foccroulle and the Harmonia Mundi team are to be applauded for their imaginativeness.

Error on this page? Let us know here

Need more information on this product? Click here