Dowland: Mr Dowland's Midnight

Many composers have been reluctant to set Shakespeare’s words to text, but Vaughan Williams remained undaunted, using his words many times in his compositions. This disc includes RVW’s ‘Orpheus with his lute’ and many other songs of longing of the early baroque. Performed by Swedish soprano Elisabeth Holmertz, the duo of Holmertz and Bock accompany her, along with Poul Hoxbro on low whistle.

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.

Includes premiere recordings of MacGregor's arrangements of works by Dowland, Gismonti and Piazzolla.

Soprano Emily Van Evera is an uncommonly versatile singer. Her luminous voice blends sense with sensuousness, and can sound at once tender and thrillingly beautiful. Fittingly, Van Evera’s inspiration for this recording is Lady Penelope Rich, a “heart-stealing goddess” who was sister to the Earl of Essex, muse to poets and musicians and the devoted mistress to Lord Mountjoy. She also inspired some of the finest music by composers of Elizabethan England.

The music on My Lady Rich ranges from the Shakespearean (How should I your true love know – from Hamlet, a mad song of Ophelia’s, the tragic character to whom Lady Rich’s predicament has been likened), to the Spanish Vuestros ojos (Lady Rich was famously fluent in Spanish), from the spirited (Hampton Court Masque in which Lady Rich took part in 1604) to the sorrowful (And is it night, a nocturnal yearning for a lost lover).

Emily Van Evera has won international acclaim for her numerous ground-breaking and award-winning recordings, particularly of earlier repertoire. Her chart-topping CD of the music of Hildegard von Bingen was singled out by The Gramophone for her characteristic expressivity: “the sheer power of the words comes across nowhere else as strongly as in Van Evera’s performance.”