HOLBORNE: The Honie – suckle; Muy Linda;The Night Watch; The Countess of Pembroke’s Paradise; The Fairy Round: COLLARD: Go From My Window; Hugh Aston’s Ground: BATCHELAR: Pavan No18 (From Selected Works for Lute) : DANYEL: Mrs.Anne Grene Her Leaves be Greene: ANON: (From Lady Margaret’s Lute Book) The Flowers of the Forest; Remember me at Eveninge; The English Nightingale; BYRD: (Arr F.Cutting): BRITTEN: Britten: Nocturnal after John Dowland: Reflections on Come, heavy sleep, Op. 70 (arr. J. Lindberg): DOWLAND: A Dream; Fantasia in Gm P6; Orlando Sleepeth ; Galliard to Lachrimae; Mr Dowland’s Midnight ; Farewell Fancy; J.JOHNSON: Passingmeasures Pavin; Carmans Whistle; Good Night and Good Rest.
Jakob Lindberg (Lute)
BIS : BIS2082
Jakob Lindberg is one of the world’s most well – known and well respected players of the family of Lute instruments and so any new recording is an event, but this particular album has a most unusual track as its title, mainly because it is the Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten , all 18 minutes of it, and written for the guitar originally. Now, arranging pieces of Lute music for the guitar is very common, but going the other way? This is far rarer, especially a piece with such modern harmonies as this ground – breaking piece, by one of our greatest English composers. It sits in almost the middle of the recital, with much more familiar sets of pieces either side, the longest of these being a little over five minutes and often considerably shorter than that.
The Renaissance period was a wonderful one for music for the lute, especially the English player/composers, and every track here is a supreme example of the marvelous music that exists still after hundreds of years. So we begin with the first of five pieces by Anthony Holborne who seemed incapable of writing a boring, hum- drum piece for the lute, and the Honie- Suckle and those following prove my point. His set ends with The Fairy Round, a jig – like dance piece that has some wonderful finger work from Lindberg, beautifully captured on this very clear and natural sounding recording. Collard’s Go From My Window is one of those pieces that nearly every lute composer made his own version of, every one of them often quite different in many different ways. Collard’s version is restrained, with the melody always there on the top of plenty of passage work underneath, with all the variations showing just how good the composer was, and our performer is. His other work Hugh Aston’s Ground is one of small number of pieces I had not heard before, very serious and dignified and another stand out piece of writing and playing. Daniel Batchelar’s huge lute repertoire is only exemplified by Pavan No18, which is , as it should be, a slow beat, with many very quick passages of complex writing that make this essentially slow work sound very complex and a lot faster at times than it actually is. There is one work by Danyel, the play on words that is Mrs Anne Grene, Her Leaves be Greene, and then the ubiquitous Anon with some lovely and mostly well – known pieces. The recital ends with several pieces by two of the greatest of them all John Dowland and John Johnson.
This is a wonderful album full of the sounds of one of the greatest stringed instruments of them all, for all these pieces sound so different when played on the guitar in comparison to the lute. The lute always sounds essentially the best way to hear them, and this CD is faultless, and definitely one for you to go and search out, for it is really worth the effort.
Chris Dumigan
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