In November 2022 Fretwork return for the second instalment of their cycle of works by Matthew Locke. Matthew Locke was born 400 years ago in 1622, and while he is often ranked as one of England’s finest composers, he is still unaccountably neglected: his music may not be as immediately appealing as his immediate successor, Henry Purcell, nor as wide-ranging as William Byrd, yet his forceful musical personality and luxuriant technique place him in the first echelon of English composers, with his works described by Richard Boothby of Fretwork as having a “quixotic, capricious restlessness that is constantly challenging the listener to follow his argument ... a thrilling musical ride”. Accompanying Fretwork on continuo for this recording are David Miller (archlute and theorbo) and Silas Wollston (harpsichord). The cover of the album bares an inscription in the walls by the choir stall of Exeter Cathedral, thought to have been carved by the composer during his time as a member of the choir there.

REVIEWS:

In most of the suites, Fretwork exploits the textural and percussive effects of the theorbo and harpsichord - both played with terrific flair - which articulate the all-pervasive dance rhythms. In the serene F major Suite No. 6, omitting the continuo highlights the sparse transparency of the three-part texture and Fretwork ‘play plain’ its interlaced melodies, weaving them into a sheer fabric of sound.

The players obviously relish these convivial musical conversations and the album makes for felicitous listening and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to Locke’s viol consorts.

-- BBC Music Magazine

An intriguing recording: on first playing, I found this album difficult to get into, an experience. However, with repeated listenings it did it start to reveal its true – and beautiful – self. These ‘Pavans, Ayres, Corants and Sarabands’ by Matthew Locke are strange things indeed. It is the strangely shifting, uncanny edge to Locke’s music that is his trademark – and Fretwork here transform it into something beguiling.

Most intriguing are the fleeting moments when Fretwork do not sound like a viol consort. Locke’s designation of the book as ‘for viols or violins’ acknowledges that the viol was soon to be usurped by the violin; here, Fretwork embody this historical juncture through a flexibility and agility of stroke.

-- Gramophone

REVIEWS:

This is something of a concept album. It’s also a programme that has been toured and performed in concert many times and reaches fruition as a disc. It takes Elizabethan and Jacobean lute music and marries it to the poetry and theatre of the time. Sometimes a single track is given over to verse or a short scene from a play, spoken by Robert Aubry Davis; but also we hear a speech or lyric spoken above, as it were, lute accompaniment. This sometimes makes things difficult to judge artistically vis a vis Ronn McFarlane’s lute playing, but it’s a disc to be measured against a rather wider canvass than usual, a multi-disciplinary words and music presentation.

Most of the music is by Dowland, but there is one piece by Campion, another by Byrd and others by our old pal, Anonymous. The theatrical performances derive from Shakespeare - Henry VIII, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona - as well as Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. There are poems by Wyatt, with which we begin and end, Robert Herrick and Samuel Daniel. Thomas D’Urfey’s wickedly naughty The Wanton Trick is here too.

As an example of a theatrical presentation it works well. Whether it has longevity on disc is a moot point, because some of the extracts are very brief, and also because the lute, played behind the voice, is demonstrably there for evocative effect. Ronn McFarlane has a number of discs to his name of lute music and is indeed a fine player. There are times when he inclined to the brusque and overly metrical - one thinks of Mrs Winter’s Jump for example; the woman in question must have been quite a motoric figure if his playing is anything to go by.

Next we have the spoken element. The method in the Wyatt ‘title track’, and others, is this. Davis speaks the first stanza, and then McFarlane joins in behind him. Note though that they were separately recorded.

The texts are printed in full, and the booklet has been nicely designed and amusingly written (by Davis). Indeed the disc is cleverly programmed.

-- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International

The revival of the lute and its repertoire in the later twentieth century has been so thorough that it is difficult now to remember how much a "distant shore" the instrument seemed to musicians even a few generations ago. Like the cornett or the viola da gamba or the harpsichord, it was an instrument - and a repertoire, and a set of performance practices - that was all but dead for many years, that needed to be revived more or less from scratch. As for the lute music of the later Baroque period, it represents an instrument long past its heyday: even late-Baroque musicians themselves considered the lute a distant shore - an anachronism.

REVIEWS:

Dirty Linen (8-9/99, p.65) - "...one of America's best lutenists....offers 44 tracks of music from three manuscripts from the 17th century. There is generally more nobility than abandon in the treatments...masterfully played."

‘A pleasing melancholy’ is how Robert Burton described the feeling that certain music can give rise to, in his The Anatomy of Melancholy from 1621. Some 20 years earlier John Dowland, melancholic par excellence, had expressed a similar idea in the dedication of his Lachrimae, or Seven Tears: ‘pleasant are the tears which music weeps’. During this period in England, melancholia had become fashionable, especially in cultural and literary circles, and spawned countless poems, paintings and songs. When Dowland’s lute song Flow My Tears was published in 1600, the instrumental Lachrimae Pavan on which it was based had been in circulation for several years and was the composer’s ‘number one hit’ both in England and on the continent – and four years after the song, he returned to the music and varied it in the ‘seven tears’ for viol consort and lute. Colleagues of Dowland such as Robert Jones and John Danyel explored similar moods and emotions in their own songs, sometimes – as in Danyel’s Eyes look no more – making clear allusions to Dowland’s famous pavan. The Chelys Consort of Viols released their first disc in 2015 to critical acclaim. For the present recording they are joined by lutenist James Akers, and Emma Kirkby, the English soprano who has long been a leading figure in the field of early music.

The works featured on this new album are by German composer Esaias Reusner (1636-1679). Reusner was a child prodigy who traveled and performed at courts across Europe with his lutenist father, Esaias senior. Reusner released two collections of lute suites, “Deliciae testudinis,” and “Neue Lauten-fruchte.” These pieces are taken from the latter. These pieces are performed by world-renowned Japanese lutenist, Toyohiko Satoh. Satoh gave his first public recital in Tokyo in 1965, and moved to Europe shortly after. He studied lute with Eugen Muller-Dombois at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland.

Acknowledged as a model and authority by the great German composer Michael Praetorius, Simone Molinaro (1565-1636) is little known today but was known throughout Europe in his own age. He died as master of music at the ducal palace of Genoa, an eminent role he had held for a decade. Born into a musical family, he trained as a church musician and took vows in the early stages of priesthood before begin dismissed in 1616 as Chapel Master of music at the Cathedral in Genoa, having the previous year married into local aristocracy. All the while he continued to play, to teach and to compose on his principal instrument, the theorbo. This book of dances, fantasias and intabulations was published in 1599 and it demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the instrument and its repertoire. The rich and challenging chords and fingerings demonstrate Molinaro’s own virtuosity as a performer. There is something quintessentially noble about Molinaro’s work as a composer. Although his idiom is that of the Renaissance, his musical ideas reveal the sort of horizontal, linear development that owes much to Flemish counterpoint. In Ugo Nastrucci’s careful ordering of the volume, moments of strict counterpoint alternate with lighter virtuoso variations in the extended passamezzi which contrast with elegant galliards and sprightly saltarellos. Nastrucci closes the album with what is probably Molinaro’s most famous piece, the Ballo detto il Conte Orlando which was transcribed over a century ago in modern notation by Oscar Chilesotti, and rearranged by Ottorino Respighi in the first suite of his Antiche arie e danze of 1917.

John Johnson and Antony Holborne share much in common, in their music and in their careers, but this album, in setting their work side by side, reveals their individual style and approach to the instrument. It is assumed that they both were born in the 1540s, without authoritative record, but their work in the royal court of the 1560s is attested. Johnson made his career as an accomplished performer, while Holborne’s energies were focused on writing for the instrument. In the case of Johnson, the pavans, galliards and grounds recorded by Yavor Genov incorporate an amalgam of native and foreign (especially Italian) elements. His works show the English taste for cross-relations, surprising harmonic and tonal relationships and, above all, variation. However, like Holborne, he developed the form of the pavan during the course of his career, endowing it with increasing richness of ornamentation and expression, to be enjoyed in full in the melancholy undertow of the Passingmeasures Pavan. Holborne’s lute music is still more painstakingly elaborate, designed perhaps less for public show than private reflection, to give as much pleasure to the musician as to his courtly audience. With two albums on Brilliant, of music by Kapsberger and Zamboni, the young Bulgarian lutenist has introduced himself to international audiences and proved to be a thoroughly sympathetic interpreter of this idiom which trades on subtle intimacies of phrase, decoration and inflection.

15 years ago lutenist Jakob Lindberg bought a very special instrument - one of the four extant lutes by Sixtus Rauwolf, built c.1560. The restoration of the lute took several years and was rather painstaking: for some repairs they een used ancient wood from the library in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence! Considering the great age of the instrument it was nevertheless in good shape and is now probably the only one in the world that, retaining its orignal soundboard, is in playable condition. This unique feature Lindberg has wanted to celebrate by recording music suitable for the instrument. Once upon a time, probably in 1715, this lute was equipped with a new neck allowing for a greater number of courses. This makes it perfect for the lute works of Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), famous among his contemporaries as the finest lutenist of his generation. (There is some reason to believe that Bach composed a couple of his works for solo lute after having met Weiss in 1739.) Weiss was also the most prolific of all lute composers: some 600 pieces have survived, whcih may amount to half of his entire production for the instrument. Most of the pieces on this disc are early works, grouped in suites - or Sonatas as Weiss himself termed them - by the composer himself or, in some cases, by Jakob Lindberg. Included are some of Weiss's best-known works, e.g. the 'Fantasie in C minor' as well as one of his rare fuguges for lute.

One of today’s foremost exponents of his instrument, Jakob Lindberg arrived at the lute by way of the guitar and played both for several years. When he decided to devote himself exclusively to the historic lute repertoire it was with some regret that he gave up his first love. During his last year with the modern guitar Lindberg was working on Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland, one of the seminal guitar works of the 20th century. Much later, when he learned that Britten had originally had in mind to compose a piece for the lute, he started to experiment playing sections of Nocturnal on his Renaissance lute, and soon decided to make a transcription of the complete work. Nocturnal is based on Dowland’s four-part song Come, Heavy Sleep, and inspired by this, Jakob Lindberg has placed it as the center piece of a recital with mostly Elizabethan pieces, many of which also evoke aspects of the night. Dowland himself is represented by a selection of six lute solos, while the opening section consists of five pieces by Dowland’s older colleague Anthony Holborne. The closing track is by Holborne’s contemporary, John Johnson, and bids the listener Good Night and Good Rest.