John Dowland
John Dowland's lute songs and ayres carry a rare, deliberate melancholy: tears that fall in measured pavans, love that stings in galliards, darkness that still sings. His music remains the living heart of the English Renaissance songbook.
Flow my tears and the Lachrimae pavans built on its falling phrase became the signature of an age that found beauty in exile and night. He wrote for his own instrument, the lute: solo works, songs for one voice and lute, part-songs, and consort pieces with viols. Can she excuse my wrongs, In darkness let me dwell, Sorrow stay, Time stands still: the titles alone map a private weather of longing and complaint. Yet the craft is never heavy. The lines move with courtly grace, the dances sparkle, and the bitterness sits inside music made to ravish the ear. Semper Dowland, semper dolens was his own wry motto, and four centuries on singers and lutenists still reach for him when they need truth without noise.
Compositions by John Dowland appear on
A Classic Case of Love
Soprano Helen Noonan and guitarist Peter Constant present an intimate programme of love songs spanning centuries, from folk and early music to Schubert, Satie, Villa-Lobos and the twentieth-century stage and songbook.
What if a Day or a Month or a Year
Elizabethan lute songs and Ayres sung by Gerald English, a founding member of the Deller Consort, with Jonathan Rubin on lute and Sharyn Wicks on gamba.
Le Rossignol
Margaret Lynch, soprano, and Peter Lynch, guitar, present works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The recital was recorded in the natural acoustic of the Great Hall at Montsalvat in Eltham, Victoria.
Walsingham
Renowned Australian lutenist Rosemary Hodgson’s Walsingham gathers Elizabethan lute variations on a sacred ballad into a contemplative Marian rondo of mysticism and pilgrimage.
Australian Monody
The Marais Project is joined by countertenor Russell Harcourt for a collection of largely Australian songs and instrumental works, spanning light and darkness, love and loss.
Sit Down Beside Me
In its inimitable style, Pastance again brings together music from the folk traditions and the early music world.
Joy
Joy names the intent behind much of this music: carols of piety, the longing of Landini and Machaut, and Hildegard von Bingen’s soaring beauty. The collection shows how song shaped everyday life in the Middle Ages.
Falling Through Time
All the colour and mystique of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance come alive in a presentation rich in music and drama, spanning troubadour song, Machaut, courtly dance and English lute song.