John Lugge (1580-c.1647)
The Forbidden Fruit
William Whitehead (organ)
rec. 2025, l’Eglise Saint-Michel de Bolbec, France
First recordings
Hortus 273 [46]

Not a great deal of detail is known about John Lugge’s life, though it is apparent that his musical career was largely spent at Exeter Cathedral. The blurb on the back of this CD quotes William Cotton, Bishop of Exeter, who in 1618 was tasked with examining Lugge to find out if he had heretical Roman Catholic sympathies: “I fear, and by conference do suspect that he hath eaten a little bit, or mumbled a piece of this forbidden fruit, yet I verily believe that he hath spit it all out again.” Hereby Lugge’s name was cleared, and the title for this CD was found.

It is mildly ironic that such a very English composer should find his music being recorded on an organ in France but surviving early 17^th century organs are a genuine rarity, and the Grande Orgue dans l’Eglise Saint-Michel de Bolbec is a very fine sounding instrument indeed. The church of Saint-Michel has a big acoustic not dissimilar to that of Exeter Cathedral, and this recording captures detail in the sound as well as some of the atmosphere of the location. The tuning and sound is appropriate to this period of music, but this is by no means the kind of hair-shirt listening experience we sometimes used to encounter with historic organs wheezing and clattering their way through each piece. Everything here is well maintained and not a fleck of dust to be seen, with crisp trebles and some nicely full sounding bass pipes. All of the registrations of these performances are given in the booklet as well as the organ’s composition.     

John Lugge’s organ music falls into two genres: plainchant-based pieces and freely composed works that are regarded as probably the earliest examples of ‘double voluntary’ pieces, a style later brought to maturity by Blow and Purcell. The difference between these two genres is very apparent, with the plainchant melodies very clear in the setting of Gloria tibi trinitas, but with elegant and playfully rhythmic accompaniment figurations that organist William Whitehead suggests are descended from “the ghost of Byrd”. Fashionable techniques of the day meet quasi-mediaeval callbacks, but the contrasts of colour and texture are superbly captured here and this is by no means a dry intellectual set of performances in music that shows how skilled an organist Lugge must have been.

The programme ends with the three Voluntaries, numbers one and three of which are claimed as world premiere recordings. These are rich in counterpoint and again filled with delightful contrasts of sonority, from the rich pedal tones in Voluntarie I, the soft lyricism and doux vibrato that opens Voluntarie II, and the marvellous build-up and fabulously scrunchy tuning in the final Voluntarie III.   

On Twitter (currently X) there is an account for this composer that announces, “I am the composer, John Lugge, man of Barnstaple and Exeter, pricker of song and musicke for ye organnes, born c.1580. I tweete about my lyfe.” John Lugge is most certainly a composer worth getting to know, and you won’t find any other such recordings so this enterprising release is your one-stop Lugge collection. 

Dominy Clements

Contents
Gloria tibi trinitas      
Christe qui lux
Miserere
In nomine
Ut re mi fa sol la
Voluntarie [I]
Voluntarie [II]
Voluntarie [III]