Dowland: Lachrimae Verae (True Tears)

This new col legno production features compositions for different ensembles with different instrumentation from the concert series ‘Kontinent Rihm’, hosted by the Salzburg Festival in 2010. It succeeds in recapturing the concept of the series in a nutshell, namely, to place individual works by Wolfgang Rihm into a larger context and confront them with other composers’ music.

John Dowland, born in London around 1563, was the most renowned lutenist in Europe. As a composer, he captured perfectly the fashionable melancholy of the Elizabethan age.

For her new album In Darkness Let Me Dwell, viola da gamba virtuoso Hille Perl has selected some of Downland’s songs, coupled with instrumental pieces from his famous collection Lachrimae, or Seven Tears (1604). Together with her viola da gamba ensemble The Sirius Viols, the Amercian lutenist Lee Santana and the soprano Dorothee Mields Hille Perl eloquently portrays the melancholy spirit of Dowland’s music. In the songs, the solo lute pieces, the gaillards and pavanes for viola da gamba consort this melancholy is infinitely touching, and highly expressive.

For this recording, The Sirius Viols was able to use copies of original instruments from the workshop of renowned instrument maker Tilman Muthesius from Potsdam.

A fascinating project initiated by Hilliard Ensemble tenorist John Potter with producer Manfred Eicher, which re-examines the beautiful songs of the great sixteenth century composer from a present-day perspective. Potter: "This is the first time anyone's approached Dowland not from an 'early music' angle, but simply as music. We're working with Dowland as though he were still with us." The subject matter of the songs, with despair and 'alienation' uppermost, is entirely pertinent for our times, and the exceptional ensemble ranged around John Potter restores an improvisational flexibility to the music.

In Elizabethan and Jacobean England the artistic cult of melancholy was not just an aesthetic conceit, but arose from ancient philosophical speculation on the dual nature of the human soul, which struggled to find its divine nature in the darkness of the material world. One of the most influental texts was the Corpus Hermeticum attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, and handed down in the Renaissance via the translation of Marsilio Ficino. In this recording, we alternate readings from this text with music based on John Dowland's famous Lachrimae theme, including his Lachrimae or Seaven Teares of 1604 for five viols and lute, and other pieces by Giles Farnaby, Anthony Holborne, Thomas Weelkes and the contemporary composer Andrew Wilson-Dickson.

Our programme evokes a journey of the soul, from its creation to its return to God, and Dowland reminds us that "though the title doth promise teares, unfit guests in these joyfull times, yet no doubt pleaseant are the teares which Musicke weepes, neither are teares shed alwayes in sorrowe, but sometime in joy and gladnesse."