The songs of John Dowland are sparkling highlights, not only of Renaissance music, but of Western music in general. His ‘First Booke of Songes’ contains some particularly bright gems.
Following her debut release of Baroque works by Vivaldi and Handel earlier this year, Grace Davidson returns to disc on Signum with an intimate disc of Dowland’s first book of lute songs, accompanied by David Miller. Blending melancholy with wit in his writing for both lute and voice, John Dowland’s songs have continued to enchant audiences and singers for nearly 400 years. The ‘First Booke’ includes some of Dowland’s less well-known works, and was recorded in the sensitive acoustic of Ascot Priory in Berkshire, UK.
In 1597 John Dowland (1563-1626) published his first collection of music, The First Book of Songs or Airs of Four Parts with Tableture for the Lute. A groundbreaking work in several respects, not least in that it was the first published collection of English lute songs, it success was immediate, and was reprinted several times. His Second Book of Songs or Airs (1600) shows the increasingly solo nature of the lute-song, as Dowland left the first eight songs as lute solos.
The superbly consistent quality of the Third Book of songs by John Dowland suggests that the earlier issues, First Book and Second Book also recorded by Anthony Rooley and the Consort of Musicke, were no mere flashes in the pan, but set the tone for the whole series.
The Golden Age of Music & Theatre: The times of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) offered much more than great theatre. Those were years when music flourished, a time of saucy street ballads, of melancholy lute-songs and madrigals. Great artists of the early music scene convey us into this seemingly distant world and bring it to life…
A cloudy sky and raindrops beating on the window: this itself is practically music, and for centuries, the sound of rain from the clouds has inspired not only painters but also poets and composers. On her debut GENUIN release, violist Karolina Errera and her piano partner Lilit Grigoryan present a selection of highly emotional music from John Dowland to Benjamin Britten. The prizewinner of numerous international competitions has placed a wide range of original works and arrangements on the program of this album – moving works that are best suited by both the warm sound of viola and piano, as well as the playing culture of the two interpreters!
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 distil the chamber music principle into its 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.