Lute, Official Digital Download

She has a particular passion for solo music of the 17th and 18th centuries for baroque lute and for Ensemble Music using theorbo and baroque guitar as continuo instruments.

Nigel North is one of the finest lute players in our midst today, and his legendary four-CD set, ‘Bach on the Lute’ (Linn records 1994 to 1996) remains unsurpassed in its technical and musical brilliance. Now, he completes his journey with a double CD combining Bach's original 'lute works' (more likely written for Lautenwerck, or luteharpsichord), with North's own lute transcriptions of Bach's music for flute, organ, and more. This is an exquisite recording, full of space and intimacy, which makes you feel as though it is being played just for you. A must-have.

Early-music string specialist PK Farstad presents a programme of Lute Works from the great John Dowland!

Weiss probably wrote more than 1000 pieces for lute, from which about 850 attributed pieces survived, most of them grouped into 'sonatas' (not to be confused with the later classical sonata, based on sonata form) or suites, which consist mostly of baroque dance pieces. Weiss also wrote chamber pieces and concertos, but only the solo parts have survived for most of them.

Weiss probably wrote more than 1000 pieces for lute, from which about 850 attributed pieces survived, most of them grouped into 'sonatas' (not to be confused with the later classical sonata, based on sonata form) or suites, which consist mostly of baroque dance pieces. Weiss also wrote chamber pieces and concertos, but only the solo parts have survived for most of them.

Beni Araki began her studies as a harpsichordist at the “Toho-Gakuen” in Tokyo.

The music on this album is the result of decades of research and many lecture-recitals performed across the US, with publication of a book of scores bearing the same title. We do not pretend to know whether Shakespeare the playwright played the lute — or whether the historical figure of Shakespeare the playwright existed at all. But we know that the plays were a collaborative effort written and produced in concert with several of the best literary and musical figures of the Elizabethan/Jacobean age, and indication for music in Shakespeare plays was as ubiquitous as any other stage direction.

The seven compositions commonly called works for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach, despite more than a century of studies, do not seem to want to completely reveal the mystery of their birth, of their real instrumental destination and of Bach's decidedly abstract concept of the instrument, the lute, which in its latest evolution continued after almost three centuries of glory to attract the attention of the highest musical lineage.

Der 1986 in Horn geborene und in Wien lebende Gitarrist Klaus Haidl ist sowohl in der alten Musik als auch im Jazz und in der transdisziplinären zeitgenössischen Musik zu Hause.

This programme is meant to witness this precise type of practise, and in some manner aims at recreating the musical atmosphere of these two musicians’ meeting, during which, as reported by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in the Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung, «being aware of the difficulty in performing controlled and elegant phrases on the lute, eyewitnesses ensure that the great lutenist from Dresden, together with the great organist and harpsichordist Bach improvised many fugues and fantasies together».