Review – The Art of David Munrow
Edward Breen revisits the recordings of the early music evangelist David Munrow
A box-set always offers pause for reflection, and the sheer satisfactory weight of this release is remarkable as it is the result of an all-too-short career. Yet these 21 discs are just the tip of an iceberg, being only Munrow's Warner recordings (originally HMV et al), mostly with the Early Music Consort of London but also including solo albums, film soundtracks and, somewhat delightfully, selected movements from three Brandenburg Concerto recordings conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Davison and Adrian Boult.
David Munrow remains one of those rare musicians whose reputation seems only to expand with time. Half a century after his death these recordings bear no hint of reverent archaeological exercises; rather they exude the freshness and fluidity of dispatches from a parallel universe in which the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance never really vanished at all. "The Art of David Munrow' is therefore much more than a memorial anthology: it is the portrait of a musical revolutionary caught in perpetual motion, scholar, impresario, evangelist, broadcaster and, above all, virtuoso. Munrow's biographer Edward Blakeman repeatedly emphasises his gift for early-music vivification in his booklet essay and it is true that such qualities radiate freely, but key moments also situate these performances in the maelstrom of 1970s performance practice. One understands why contemporary audiences found these recordings genuinely startling and perhaps why subsequent scholars and enthusiasts found them rather too colourful. Listening chronologically, one hears not merely the development of a performer but the creation of a listening culture in which shawms, crumhorns and sackbuts possessed an excitement and theatricality that hasn't ever quite been replicated since.
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To read the full text of this review please visit Gramophone.co.uk (August 2026)
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