This recording devoted to Dowland seems to open a door onto a secret garden, one tended and cultivated by two artists already well known for opera and song recitals that distill the chamber music principle into it's most intimate essence of expressive sound: soprano Mariana Flores, and lutenist Hopkinson Smith. Here they give us a Dowland programme straight from the heart, drawing on five of the composer's volumes of 'Songs or Ayres' printed in London between 1597 and 1612, laying bare Dowland's ecstatic and tortured soul as it oscillates between all the different states of melancholy love.

The French and Italian Renaissance song repertoire, immortalised during the first three decades of the sixteenth century by the printed editions of Pierre Attaingnant in Paris and Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice, invites audiences, and in former times performers, to immerse themselves in a world in which memories of medieval courtly poetry, the austerity (as reimagined in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) of ancient lamentations, and a fully polyphonic narrative style, were all collided and superimposed-a certain sense of conversation can remind us also of the French air de cour as well as the early Italian madrigal form. These chansons and frottole give rise to discrete, almost enigmatic emotions, where music and text unite as one, transparent and restrained. Guided by the subtle sound of Hopkinson Smith's lute, the diaphanous voice of German soprano Sophie Klussmann roams over this little-known early Renaissance territory through four sections which take the form of return journeys between France and Italy. The sly melancholy of songs by Claude de Sermisy (Puisqu'en amours) and other French contemporary figures, some of them settings of poems by Clement Marot, thus collides with more plaintive pieces, by Marchetto Cara (Io non compro piu speranza) and Bartolomeo Tromboncino, whose supplicatory Per dolor me bagno il viso and final, heady Dolermi sempre voglio both attain peaks of intensity, at the same time being two sumptuous examples of the frottola form. During these sixty minutes, Sophie Klussmann produces exquisitely subtle and precious wisps of sound, recalling that the heart and soul of these snapshots very often remains the matter of love. Her dark gold timbre hints at the eternal in the one piece in the programme whose text is of a religious nature, the sublime, questioning prayer Se mai per maraveglia.

The “supreme poet of the lute” (Gramophone) Hopkinson Smith creates a subtle, intimate dialogue between Dalza and Spinacino, witnesses of the instrument’s flourishing culture in Italy at the dawn of the 16th century. Hopkinson Smith, that indefatigable pioneer for over forty years, eager hunter of the most distant scores and defender of restoring often-obscure manuscripts, will stop at nothing in his exploration and revival of the huge repertoire of his instrument.

In this recording, his art, underpinned by a vast historic knowledge together with a profound faith in intuition, examines the first music printed for the lute, and some of the first sources for the instrument to have reached us. In a perfectly symmetrical programme structured around a central piece by Marchetto Cara, the Swiss-American lutenist intertwines pieces inspired from popular dance by Joan Ambrosio Dalza and several free-form ricercari by Francesco Spinacino, taken from collections of tablatures published in Venice in 1507 and 1508.