Since 2020, Margret Koell, a proven specialist in historical harps, has been in possession of a "Welsh Triple Harp". It is a copy of an instrument by the famous harp maker Evans, whose original from 1736 is kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This wonderful harp was the occasion for the present album with works by the two famous British composers John Dowland and Henry Purcell. Despite the long harp tradition on the British Isles, there is no original literature for the harp from this period. Margret Koell had to resort to literature for lute or keyboard instruments, which she makes sound on the harp without major changes. The pieces by Dowland and Purcell are characterized by a melancholy that was popular in their time, often combined with a light, dance-like impression. Margret Koell takes us on a "silent dance", into the mood of a fading early autumn summer day.

One of the most attractive and poignant repertories from across the whole Renaissance is undoubtedly to be found in the output of John Dowland, the composer of the greatly-admired Lachrimae and the musical representative of a whole philosophical, literary and artistic outlook when it comes to evoking melancholy. Lutenist José Miguel Moreno, co-founder of Glossa and architect of cult recordings devoted to Sylvius Leopold Weiss, JS Bach and Robert de Visée, could not miss out on his encounter with English repertoire and, in 2002, he recorded this double disc covering, across some 32 pieces, the most significant of Dowland's works, and accompanied by Eligio Quinteiro on the theorbo or gittern (renaissance guitar). This is one of those albums which define the whole aesthetic standpoint of a label...

This recording fulfills one of Dominique Visse’s life ambitions, which dates from the late 1970s and the period during which he studied and worked with Alfred Deller: to record an album of John Dowland’s songs. And who better than to record with than celebrated English viol consort Fretwork, who have made a number of historic recordings of Dowland’s music? Visse is also joined by Renaud Delaigue in rarely-performed versions of three of the songs.

Includes work(s) by John Dowland. Soloist: Nigel North.

My colleague David Vernier rightly praised Nigel North's unhurried, sensitively inflected John Dowland interpretations on the Arcana label. Perhaps that review inspired the good folks at Naxos to sign North on for its Dowland lute works cycle! Whereas Volume 1 juxtaposed the composer's more complex fantasias with relatively lightweight dance pieces, Volume 2's predominance of pavanes and galliards generally sustains a more reflective mood throughout. Two versions of Dowland's arguably best-known work, the Lachrimae Pavane, bookend the collection, with another wistful beauty, Semper Dowland Semper Dolens (Dowland is always doleful), tacked on at the end, with plenty of lyrical gems in between. Judging North's insightful virtuosity in the face of Paul O'Dette's reference edition on Harmonia Mundi invokes the old apples-versus-oranges cliché.

For the most part North favors more ruminative tempos that he discreetly adjusts in order to approximate how a singer phrases and breathes. By contrast, O'Dette is swifter and goes for larger, more rhythmically defined phrase shapes. He is less likely than North to linger over a piquant dissonance or wide interval leap. In other words, O'Dette is Artur Schnabel or Leon Fleisher to North's Wilhelm Kempff or Claudio Arrau. In the Earl of Essex Galliard, for example, O'Dette's lithe, dance-like playing deliciously points up the cross-rhythms. North's grander, more emphatically accented traversal coaxes more color out of the single lines and rolled chords. And in the aforementioned Semper Dowland, North shaves three minutes off of O'Dette's seven-and-a-half minute timing by not taking repeats. North's scholarly, extremely readable annotations and Naxos' roomy yet detailed engineering can only sweeten this disc's appeal. Highly recommended.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

The pre-eminent lutenist of his day, John Dowland was an almost exact contemporary of William Shakespeare.

After the success of the first fourteen reissues, which restored to the limelight some of the gems of the early music repertory in the catalogues of our labels, here are fourteen new titles to allow listeners to renew acquaintance with further treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque (and even a journey through time thanks to Raphaël Imbert’s album Bach Coltrane), performed by some of the leading interpreters of the genre; most of these discs won one or more awards on their first release. As with the first series, the artists have been asked to contribute to the booklets, in which, with a few years’ hindsight, they talk about their conception of the works and how they went about recording them. The photographers of the Magnum agency illustrate the covers of the series with their work; this time the common design element is the colour yellow.In addition to the 13 titles shown below, the album FIRENZE 161 by LE POEME HARMONIQUE, VINCENT DUMESTRE, will also be reissued.

DOWLAND: Flow My Tears and Other Lute Songs

DOWLAND: Consort Music and Songs

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 seven Lachrimae Pavan of 1604 are widely held to mark not only the high point of Dowland’s work but the entire genre of viol consort music. Dowland takes a lamenting pavan that he had written some years earlier and develops its theme into a cycle which takes the listener through different states of tearfulness, from loneliness to despair through hope to love and finally joy – the ‘true tears’ of the final pavan. In its contrapuntal mastery and its ingenuity in the treatment of a single theme, the Lachrimae cycle stands alongside The Art of Fugue composed by J.S. Bach a century and a half later. Most recordings of the Lachrimae use the standard instrumentation of a consort of viols, ranging from treble to bass and accompanied by a lute. For his second recording of the cycle, however, the Italian violist Cristiano Contadin has boldly created a broken consort performance which mixes the recorder and also early violin and viola in with the uniquely grainy timbre of the viols. Such an instrumentation exploits the long association of the recorder with music of lamentation, and makes a historical connection with, for example, the cantatas of Bach. Contadin explains with a booklet essay that his aim in performance is to recover the ‘passionate’ nature of this music as Dowland envisaged it in his own written preface to the score, and indeed there is nothing dry or constricted about the performance he directs from the treble viol. Now, with three generations of period performance research and practice under their belts, musicians are beginning to play this music with the kind of freedom and spontaneity and emotion they would accord (in other ways) to Brahms, and this new recording deserves comparison with the most distinguished accounts from the recent past.

In English Renaissance collections of music, the term ‘lessons’ is often used to describe instrumental pieces, even though they aren’t pedagogical exercises as such. But as Jonas Nordberg writes in an introduction to his new disc ‘there remains much in them to be studied’. John Dowland is one of the composers whose music was a driving force of the Early Music revival already at the beginning of the 20th century. He has also played a central role in the rediscovery of the lute itself, an ongoing process which began more than a hundred years ago. Like many other musicians, Jonas Nordberg is continuously exploring the intimate relationship between a score and the instrument it was written for: ‘The pieces by Dowland on this album contain an entire musical universe, in which I have spent many years, discovering new layers of meaning. In that way these lessons – in combination with the instrument on which I play them – have also been my teachers. So it is a great pleasure to invite you to share them with me, and to explore for yourselves the rich combination of melancholy, joy and beauty to be found in these works.’

In 1610, the lutenist Robert Dowland, who had just turned 19, published two anthologies in quick succession that are today considered vital for our understanding of both the lute and Elizabethan vocal music. The first, A Varietie of Lute Lessons, which as the title suggests features lessons but also a long essay on European lute production, contains important information on lute performance, in part originating from his esteemed father, John Dowland. It is not far-fetched to imagine that Robert’s father also had a part to play in the second book, A Musicall Banquet – John had returned from the Danish court some time previously and is represented by several pieces in the anthology. Adhering to the culinary metaphor of the collection’s title, this Banquet comprises ‘recipes’ from different countries with different levels of technical difficulty, and is made up of ‘dishes’ already taste-tested so as not to poison ‘diners’, in other words, established pieces that were nonetheless as yet unknown to the English public. Robert opens his anthology with a large selection of English songs, taken from what was by that point a well-established repertoire: at the time Banquet was published, an impressive 24 books of songs had already been printed, beginning with John Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, published in 1797. The next group of pieces in the collection belong to a genre that could be considered the most similar to the English song, the French air de cour, in the sense that the latter, at least in its most ancient form, influenced the development of the former. The air de cour for voice and lute was enjoying enormous success thanks to the scores Robert Ballard began publishing in 1608. The selection of Italian pieces is the most significant part of the collection.

The high quality of the music and the full spectrum of its moods is displayed in this brilliantly played, scrupulously balanced recording.

The binding medium in this programme is the music for a 'broken' consort, the mixed-family instrumental band that took shape as an adjunct to the Elizabethan theatre; Julian Bream's devotion to consort music has remained undimmed through three decades, though the personnel of his group has changed, the modern flute has given way to its renaissance ancestor and the violin to the treble viol. Ten of the items come from Thomas Morley's ''First Book of Consort Lessons'', arrangements of various pieces by Morley, Philips, Dowland, Strogers and Alison; two more are drawn from other sources, one, the Fantasia of Byrd, presented by a 'whole' consort of three viols. Did lutenists then use the right-hand nails (as Bream, also a guitarist, does) to help their elaborate divisions (variations) to be heard as they deserved to be? We do not know, nor, when they are so brilliantly played in such a scrupulously balanced recording, do we need to. The high quality of the music and the full spectrum of its moods, coupled with the ingenuity and variety of the 'orchestration', exclude any risk of monotony, but for good measure the proceedings are punctuated with smaller-scale diversions.

Nancy Hadden acts the part of the peripatetic van Eyck as well as 'joyning hands' with Bream in Nicholson's The Jew's Dance, James Tyler plucks the humble cittern from the 'rhythm section' with an anonymous solo setting of Grimstock, and Robert Tear, in splendid voice, supplies two lute songs. The whole is a sampler of a rich area of English music that has never been really adequately represented on disc in excellent performances, and herewith recommended without apology or reservation to anyone to whom English music pre 1600 (or thereabouts) is not anathema. Acquire and enjoy.'

– John Duarte, Gramophone [2/1989]

The first notes of the descending chromatic theme break the silence and it seems as if time has stopped. The listener is drawn into the world of John Dowland, the greatest lutenist of all, in a journey through multiple shades of melancholy and lucent hope. Never before had the lute sounded as expressive and colorful as in these masterful Fancies, as dynamic as in these sparkling dances: Renaissance lute music here reached its summit. Bor Zuljan explores these qualities in his debut solo recording, breathing new life into Dowland's masterpieces. Bor Zuljan (1987) is active in different musical genres and projects and searches for a synthesis of contemporary and early music, different world music traditions, jazz and improvisation. He plays guitars, different kinds of lutes, vihuela, oud, tar and other early and traditional plucked-strings instruments. The search for the connection between sound, image and word led him to collaborate in different interdisciplinary projects. He is performing regularly as soloist and with ensembles, such as Le Concert Brisé, Geneva Camerata, Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Contrechamps, Vortex, in duo with Dusan Bogdanovic, as well as with his ensemble La Lyra. His projects have been presented in festivals such as the Laus Polyphoniae in Antwerpen, Oude Muziek in Utrecht, Mousiké in Bari, Festival Radovljica in Slovenia and many others. He also performed in China, Algeria, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark and in Croatia.