Dowland: If that a sinner's sigh

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’.

Continuing its work with the rising stars of the early music world, CORO is delighted to be releasing a brand new recording by two of The Sixteen’s principal members - soprano, Elin Manahan Thomas and theorbo and lute player, David Miller.

The seventeenth century devotional songs on this disc were written against a backdrop of furious historical dramas and lurching tides of fortune. The songs chosen reflect these assorted times and contexts, and are accordingly diverse.

Ravish’d with Sacred Extasies (a quote taken directly from Playford's ‘Harmonia Sacrae’) explores some of the most beautiful Elizabethan lute songs ranging from the doctrinally eloquent to the theologically unsteady, from the spare and the restrained to the opulent and the overblown, from Dowland’s small cluster of late devotional songs to Purcell’s flowery and luscious settings.