CCMusic.com

Hardly any gambist was as famous in the middle of the 17th century as William Young. Emperors and kings held him in high esteem. His contemporaries celebrated him as the new Orpheus, and even decades after his death, he was still considered one of the best gambists that Europe had ever had. And few gambists were so thoroughly forgotten as William Young, despite his extensive, extraordinary, and stylistically extremely diverse oeuvre. This discrepancy alone was reason enough for gambist Juliane Laake and her ensemble Art d'Echo to focus all attention and dedication on Young's work. It quickly became apparent that Young who seemingly came out of nowhere when he became employed at the Archduke's Court in Innsbruck in 1652 - neither his year of birth nor any other facts of his earlier life are known - was a wayfarer between the worlds and times. His compositions were refreshingly casual and played with the different musical styles and trends of his time: a wonderfully unconventional and still largely unacknowledged field of experimentation, a musical world of it's own that is off the beaten track and is difficult to classify in the usual categories. The album at hand contains a cross section of Young's work, taken from his only known sheet music print or from manuscripts from all over Europe. Several of the compositions are recorded for the very first time here.