Rooley

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.

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.

This charming record is as outstanding technically as in its artistic merits. Warmly recommended. –The Monthly Guide to Recorded Music

A remarkable vignette of artificial 17th-century Italian courtly life. ‘Love’ is hunted in eyes, in hair, between breasts, before a hilarious game of ‘tongue-twisters’. Best though are 14 mannered mood-pictures spanning every emotion in intensely detailed word-painting. Truly revelatory.

In as much as Alessandro Scarlatti's music is known at all, it is the large-scale operas and the chamber cantatas that have justifiably attracted the most attention. That the leading composer for the Neapolitan stage should also have turned his hand to madrigal composition, by then a distinctly outmoded and declining genre, is easily overlooked, yet a handful of such pieces have survived in manuscripts and, as this record persuasively argues, they certainly deserve a hearing. Perhaps even more surprising than their existence and survival is their style; Scarlatti eschews the possibilities of the basso continuo and opts instead for a language which at times echoes the techniques of the great age of madrigal-writing of some 100 years earlier, and above all the music of Monteverdi and Gesualdo.

Dowland: The Collected Works
The Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley
Classical | Ape | 3483 Mb | 1997

Both the music and this actual product are masterpieces. John Dowland's collected works here - covering 12 compact discs - exhibit the depth and power of this composer, a composer who many now regard as suffering from clinical depression. I doubt that the issue of the diagnosis of Dowland's depression can ever be settled, however, it is certainly obvious from his music, so completely on display here, that he was a man with very dark depths and corners in his mind. Dowland's various manifestations and "takes" on his own tune, "Flow my tears"/"Lachrimae" are here. This tune has haunted me ever since I first heard it when I was a child. It seems to sum up Dowland's feelings - at least Dowland seems to have thought so.

As might be expected, this is an excellent recording with the Consort of Musicke in superb form and a well-balanced, crystal-clear sound from the production team for the Virgin Classics Veritas label. What will come as more of a surprise is the music of the Mantuan maestro di cappella Giaches de Wert, a familiar enough figure in the history books as Monteverdi's predecessor and mentor at the Gonzaga court, but whose madrigals are still largely confined to tomes on dusty library shelves. No longer: in these performances of his Seventh Book of Madrigals of 1581 they leap off the page, teeming with the musical ideas triggered by the composer's imaginative and often inspired response to his texts.

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…

With an unmistakable sound and repertoire that ranges from classical to pop, Renaissance to the Beatles, and from folksongs to pop songs through to the avant-garde, the fantastic vocal sextet the King’s Singers have enjoyed a unique global career. Formed in 1968, this exceptional group of English vocalists will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in the coming year. ‘The Sound of The King’s Singers’ combines three of the group’s most famous albums.