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.

With this CD, we present a composer who is almost completely unknown. An astonishing admission, because his work is well documented in Georg Forster's songbooks and his compositions have also been published in print. Georg Forster himself held vom Brandt in high esteem, so much so that he dedicated the third volume of his"Teutschen Liedlein" to him. This dedication emphasises Forster's high regard for vom Brandt, but he also made dedications to other composers. Forster dedicated Volume II to his former fellow student Eck, Volume IV to Stephan Zirler, and Volume V to Dietrich Schwarz von Haselbach, with whom he had been associated since his Heidelberg days. While on the one hand friendship was important to him, he did not lose sight of quality when he wrote that he had"picked out the loveliest and worst from all of them". Forster's collection is aimed at the"friend and lover of noble music", not at the professional musician. Hence, the focus on the fact that he had selected not only the"loveliest" but also the"worst" (in the sense of plain or simple). Forster underscores that Brandt"noch heut bey tags ein sonderlicher Liebhaber un(d) fürderer ist, unnd solchs auch selbs mit der that alß mit setzen oder Componiren… noch heut bey tag beweyset" (still today by day a special lover and fancier, and also proves this himself with the deed as with setting or composing…still today by day). It seemed remarkable that vom Brandt composed during the day, for composing was not his main occupation.

Hans Neusidler (1508-1563) was born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, Slovakia) and first enters the historical record in 1530, when he settled in Nuremberg, Germany. He taught lute there in the 1530s, publishing eight books of lute music between 1536 and 1549, and also went into business as a lute maker by 1550. Neusidler was one of the most important early German lutenists. His eight publications feature intabulations of German songs, French chansons, Italian madrigals, dance pieces, and preludes of an improvisatory nature. Most of the works are in three parts, but there are two-part pieces for beginners and a few four-part arrangements in two of his publications.

Lutenist Yavor Genov presents on this album a selection of works by Neusidler, emphasizing his significance as one of the most prominent and bright lutenists of his generation, but also as one of those instrumentalists, who successfully adopted the contrapuntal musical language of the great Franco-Flemish school to the lute playing. Yavor Genov is a lutenist and basso continuo player. His three solo CDs for Brilliant Classics – “Orpheus Anglorum” (2018), “Zamboni – lute music” (2014) and “Kapsberger – Libro primo di lauto” (2013) have received international critical acclaim. He has collaborated with musicians like Dame Emma Kirkby, Núria Rial, Andrew Lawrence-King, Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Teodor Currentzis. Yavor has studied early plucked instruments and basso continuo with Jakob Lindberg.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.