Robert Dowland News
English lutenist and composer
- lute
- Kingdom of England
- composer, lutenist
Last update
2024-03-29
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2024-03-08 11:10:00
[…] similarly keen sense of narrative(s) too, without moving into the realm of representation. Even when occasionally more frenetic, it retained a sense of spareness, of everything counting. A not un-Stravinskian candle continued to burn, even to dance, to rock; yet there was a deeper melancholy that seemed to speak of and from remembered or invented landscapes of a Britain beyond its modern towns and cities (not anti-metropolitan, but rather non-metropolitan) as well as memories of Dowland. (How the composer must have hated the snake-oil-salesmen of ‘Brexit’. How wonderful it would have been to see him give Nigel Farage a piece of his mind, not that Farage would have known what to do with it.) Strength persisted, intensified, through techniques seeming to cross the centuries without ever truly being ‘of’ them. Was that a mediaevalism there? If so, it was hardly the point. Compelled, so it seemed, by the music’s inherent […]
2024-02-20 08:43:00
Knowing no boundaries: on Circus Dinograd contemporary & period performers move between styles & genres without embarrassment
Circus Dinograd; traditional, Jean-Luc Ponty, Purcell, Ravel, Jarmo Ramponen, David Faber, Hilary Summers, Maarten Ornstein, Mike Fentross, Marie-Louise de Jong, Marleen Wester, Judith van Driel, Byrd, John Dowland; Hilary Summers, Maarten Ornstein, Mike Fentross, Dudok Quartet Amsterdam; Zefir RecordsReviewed 14 February 2024Sui generis, a disc that moves between genre and style without embarrassment as the ensemble of contemporary and period performers cross from the historical to the contemporary to the improvisedCircus Dinograd on Zefir Records is an intriguing new cross-genre collaboration between contralto Hilary Summers, the bass clarinet and theorbo/vihuela duet of Maarten Ornstein and Mike Fentross, and the Dudok Quartet Amsterdam (Judith van Driel, Marleen Wester, Marie-Louise de Jong, David Faber). The idea behind the disc seems to be that there are no boundaries, so we have reimaginations of Byrd, Purcell, and Dowland alongside folksong, Ravel and pieces by the different members of the ensemble, notably a set of Seven Deadly […]
2024-01-12 07:27:00
Byrd Compared: Phantasm & Anna Prohaska celebrate the consort song
[…] January 2023, Byrd Compared: Byrd and English Song, the viol consort Phantasm (Laurence Dreyfus, Jonathan Manson, Emilia Benjamin, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola) had clearly decided to mix things up somewhat and presented a programme of consort songs, not with a familiar specialist singer, but with the challenging intelligence of British-Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska.The programme focused on the music of William Byrd, but there was also music by his older contemporary Tallis, as well the younger challenger John Dowland. The evening was arranged in themed sections, The Demise of Tallis, Hints of the Erotic, Tears and Joys, Devotion and Piety and Fallen Heroes, and throughout the consort songs were interspersed with Byrd's fantasias and in nomines.We began with The Demise of Tallis and three works by the older master, the delightful A Solfing Song where the soloist uses the names of the notes as words, the wonderfully affecting O nata lux de lumine and one of Tallis' psalm […]
2023-11-13 11:15:47
St Michael & All Angels, Blackheath, LondonThe annual festival of early music opened with a lively and virtuosic performance by Jane Chapman of works ranging from Bach and Byrd to Roxanna PanufnikFor its 50th anniversary gala, the
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