On this release, lutenist Toyohiko Satoh plays music from the court of Vienna around 1700. A special discovery on this album is the suite by Adam Franz Ginter, who was a famous castrato singer in that time, but who also composed some pieces for the lute. This recording is a tribute to this largely forgotten musician who most probably had a short and rather sad and lonely life. The following suite by Saint-Luc contains a “Tombeau for Francois Ginter” and was composed to lament the early death of this extraordinary singer, lutenist, and composer. Toyohiko Satoh studied at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. His first recital was at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan concert hall in 1965. He went on to study lute at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and just two years later, in 1970, he recorded the first album devoted entirely to the solo baroque lute. Since then he has been involved in numerous lute recordings, and has concertized throughout the world.

In Dowland’s words: “ingenuous profession of Musicke, which from my childhoode I have ever aymed at,... the better to attain so excellent a science”. Mike Fentross achieves this “divine science of musicke” by wooing his audience by “speaking harmony” on his sweet lute. His art entwines harmony and poetry, albeit often a melancholic art, which is then framed by the proportions of rhythm. His art teaches, stirs and delights the heart and soul of his honorable listeners in profound ways. Mike Fentross first studied with Toyohiko Satoh at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, then with Nigel North and José Miguel Moreno. He has built a solid reputation as a “continuist”, playing in renowned orchestras like Les Arts Florissants, and is much in demand in his country as well as abroad. He plays and records regularly with great European ensembles such as Capriccio Stravagante, Les Arts Florissants, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, the Harp Consort, the New London Consort and Al Ayre Espanol. In 1991 he founded La Sfera Armoniosa, a group devoted to the performance of 17th-century music. Since 1996 Mike Fentross is guest professor at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

Vincenzo Capirola is only slightly less of a mystery figure. It has been revealed that he was from Brescia, born into a wealthy mercantile family in 1474 and that he lived a long a life until he was in his mid-seventies. He is last recorded alive in 1548 when he was seventy-four. His parents died while Vincenzo was still young: his father when he was two, and his mother later in his youth. Documentary evidence confirms his presence in Brescia in 1489, 1498, and 1548. He was in Venice in 1517, there has been unconfirmed speculation that he may have travelled extensively in Europe and that he may even have been the same renowned Brescian lutenist who was at the English court of Henry VIII in 1515. The music of this lute book reveals Capirola as a consummate lutenist who had already attained a high level of stylistic maturity. This can be seen in all the musical genres in his book, especially in his intabulations of vocal polyphony that transform their models into attractive idiomatic solo lute music, and in his ricercars that assimilate inherited styles into engaging and coherent rhetorical narrative.