Giles Farnaby is a bit neglected among English Renaissance composers for the keyboard -- something that's hard to understand, for his contemporaries apparently thought highly of his works. They appear profusely in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the preeminent keyboard publication of Elizabethan and Jacobean times. The pieces heard here -- not all of them fantasias -- are identified by their page numbers in that book, as well as a numbering from an older, partial edition of Farnaby's works. These fantasias are not the quasi-improvisatory pieces later denoted by the word but mostly free contrapuntal pieces topped off by a concluding flourish. American-Dutch harpsichordist
Glen Wilson concedes in his notes that the fantasias do not represent Farnaby at his best; they generally lack the delicious shocks of John Bull's keyboard music, and there's a certain fluent quality in great keyboard music that eluded him here. That said, the music is presented with command on a replica of a booming Dutch harpsichord of the early seventeenth century, and the sequence of fantasias is effectively broken up with
Wilson's own keyboard arrangements of some of Farnaby's vocal pieces. This is something of a specialist disc, with a detailed discussion of tuning, fingering, ornamentation, registration, and problems with the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as a source -- it's probably not the kind of thing the average listener will find much interest in, and there are cross-genre collections of Farnaby's keyboard music on the market that will fill his or her needs better. For the serious student of early keyboard genres, however, it will fill a gap in the recorded literature.