Dowland: A Shepherd in a Shade

Dowland dedicated his song From Silent Night “To my loving countryman, Mr. John Forster the younger, merchant of Dublin, in Ireland”, revealing his possible Irish origins. Working closely with the American tenor Michael Slattery, La Nef gives Dowland’s Ayres a simple celtic flavour. “…a talented and serious artist.” Gramophone.

Damien Guillon has chosen for his first solo recital disc a refined, subtle and melancholy repertoire, which he has gone on to explore in depth and polish in genuine chamber style with the lutenist Eric Bellocq, an expert in Renaissance music.

Eric Bellocq plays a liuto forte from André Burguete’s conception, an instrument which enables the player to develop a larger sound possibilities creating a true dialogue with the singer and a great freedom in improvisation. Damien Guillon started at an early age as a member of child’s choir Brittany, then at the Versailles Baroque Center while studying organ and harpsichord. In 2004, he was admitted to the countertenor Andreas Scholl’s class at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis… He was soon spotted by such well-known conductors as Jordi Savall, Vincent Dumestre, Hervé Niquet, Jérôme Correas, Philippe Pierlot, Jean-Claude Malgoire, Christophe Rousset, William Christie, and Philippe Herreweghe. He has founded his own ensemble, Le Banquet Céleste, with which he has performed at Les Nuits Musicales d’Uzès and the Froville Festival. Their repertoire includes Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, and the cantatas for alto and obbligato organ of J. S. Bach, which will be Damien Guillon’s next recording project on Zig-Zag Territoires.

Emma Kirkby and Jakob Lindberg have devised a programme which takes in a wide spectrum of emotions: from the pastoral joyfulness of By a fountain and the melancholy of In darkness let me dwell, we are led via the desperation and drama of Bess of Bedlam to the conviction expressed in Music for a while that music has the power to vanquish even death. Interspersing the songs are lute solos, including Dowland’s immortal Lachrimae, but also Lindberg’s own transcriptions of Purcell pieces such as The Cibell and the Echo Dance of the Furies from Dido and Aeneas, performed on Lindberg’s unique four-hundred year old instrument. Kirkby and Lindberg are musical partners of long standing, with earlier collaborations on BIS including Musique and Sweet Poetrie (BISSACD1505), a survey of the lute song across Europe around the year 1600. ‘A grand tour conducted by a pair of ideal guides’ was how the reviewer in Gramophone described that disc, while his colleague in International Record Review found that the ‘undeniably glorious performances’ made the disc ‘a journey well worth making’.