The lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583–c.1642) lived and worked in a borderlandbetween musical categories. The first threedecades of his life were spent in France,then his...

The lute master Nicolas Vallet (c.1583–
c.1642) lived and worked in a borderland
between musical categories. The first three
decades of his life were spent in France,
then his musical career and published
compositions unfolded in Amsterdam.
Widely acknowledged as a lute and dance
teacher in the Netherlands, he also won
fame as one of the most important and
prolific authors of sacred music for his
instrument, making lute settings of the
Calvinist psalms from the Genevan Psalter.
Vallet lived when the lute was undergoing
significant changes in terms of tuning, right
hand technique and predominant genres,
with the impulse for some of these changes
coming from his French compatriots. Yet he
demonstrates that the older Renaissance
approaches towards both composition and
performance are still relevant. An
impressive part of his repertoire comprises
contrapuntal preludes and fantasias
following the manner of the masters of
previous generations, in which various
thematic motives and complex abstract
forms are woven into the polyphonic
texture. At the same time his lute
collections include vast variety of dances,
some of which were just entering the
performance practice of the time, such as
the Sarabande and Bourée. The volume
Regia Pietas is entirely dedicated to
Protestant (Calvinist) sacred music
intabulated for lute solo. Most of the
psalms are arranged in two parts. Vallet’s
main approaches to these chants is to either
develop them as a set of variations or
provide them a contrapuntal treatment.
This shows that Vallet’s output covers the
three instrumental genres of the
Renaissance: free abstract pieces (preludes
and fantasias), dances and settings of vocal
pieces.
For this recording a ten-course lute is used,
strung in gut at 415 Hz. This type of gut
stringing considerably affects the overall
sound of the lute, its resonance and
sonority, hopefully bringing the lute a bit
closer to what one might imagine as an
‘original’ sound of the time.
Other information:
● Recorded January 2023 in Sofia, Bulgaria
● Genov plays a 10-course lute by Jiří
Čepelák (2019, Prague), after a mid-16thcentury Bolognese model by Hans Frei
(Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, no.
C.34); strung in gut
● Booklet in English contains liner notes by
the artist and his biography