John Dowland reviews

A key touchstone for classical guitarists in Britain and beyond is the extraordinary legacy of Julian Bream who, through determined commissioning, transformed a repertory otherwise ‘stuffed with unnourishing bon-bons,’ as Wilfred Mellors tartly – but accurately – observed in 1968. The results not only engaged a wider audience for the guitar, but established the instrument as an exciting resource for contemporary composers. 

Themes of love and loss pervade this varied sequence of English lute songs both past and present. Theatre ditties by the Virgin Queen’s court lutenist Robert Johnson give way to funeral laments by his contemporary John Danyel epitomising the melancholy spirit of the age, while wistful love songs and lute solos by Dowland contrast with playful militaristic viol pieces by the quirky soldier-composer Tobias Hume.

Paul O’Dette has lived with the lute music of Dowland for over 40 years, and two decades ago recorded the complete works to widespread acclaim. It’s music through which he’s grown and which has grown in him so that this beautifully assembled anthology isn’t so much a compendium of ‘greatest hits’ (though great it is, and there are hits aplenty); rather it’s a beguiling progress report on O’Dette’s continuing journey.

Semper Dowland, semper dolens. Melancholy was a subject to which John Dowland returned again and again, making art from a mood more rich and varied in its form and qualities than mere misery. He was not alone in this obsession: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was published in 1621, by which time Dowland was the most famous lutenist of his age. As Roger Savage points out in his liner notes, this was an affliction that denoted sophistication and refinement on the part of the sufferer.

It’s surely a tribute to the artfully seductive programming of this live recital that the several episodes of applause break the spell so intrusively. Not Just Dowland espouses an Anglo-Italian sequence punctuating songs with instrumental items that ‘prelude’ most appositely, or contrive to comment on what’s just been heard.

If Kapsbergers, courses and strascini sound to you more like a culinary experience than a musical one, then consider this selection of works by Masters of the Lute – an excellent introduction to the repertoire of the instrument’s Golden Age. Matthew Wadsworth journeys across Europe explore a range of musical styles as well as the changing instrumental techniques and technologies that gave birth to the theorbo, the lute’s long-necked big brother.