Hille Perl has made a number of recordings for Deutsche Harmonia
Mundi. Peter Grahame Woolf awarded four stars to her recording
of Bach’s Cello Suite in d minor and other pieces on the
Viola da Gamba in 1999 (05472775152 – see review)
and Kevin Sutton also recommended her recording of music by Marin
Marais’s mentor, Sainte Colombe in 2004 (see review).
He criticised only the sloppy presentation of that recording but
it has since been repackaged and given a new catalogue number,
05472 77373 2, so the damage may have been corrected. I fear,
too, that what was then a mid-price recording, has reverted to
full price, and may not even be available in the UK.
Her programme of ‘Glosas, Passeggiati & Diminutions,
around 1600’, Doulce Memoire (05472775022) was also critically
well received and she is an important member of the Harp Consort,
for whose recording of Juan de Padilla, Missa Mexicana,
(budget-price Harmonia Mundi HMX290 7293) I can personally vouch
in the highest possible terms. She has also recorded for CPO
and Hänssler and made a recording for Greenpeace. DHM clearly
regard her as the star of the new CD, since they place her name
first and advertise her other recordings on the back cover of
the booklet. (Incidentally, that booklet lists a different
catalogue number, 88697362132, which is also the matrix number
of the CD; presumably this is the order number to use outside
the UK.)
Hille Perl clearly has a very special and intense
relationship with Dowland, whom she discovered at the age of
14 and felt that she ‘could die peacefully now’. In the original
German notes she speaks of a hautnah relationship with
this music; the English translation is good and idiomatic, apart
from the weird spelling critizism (p.18) but ‘the music
I had the honor to be confronted with’ cannot begin to express
the force of the German, which makes the music as close to her
as her very skin.
It’s not surprising, then, that the music for viola
da gamba consort figures prominently on this new CD. Four of
the Lachrimæ, or seaven Teares and three other items
from this collection, The Earle of Essex his Galiard,
Semper Dowland semper dolens and Captain Digorie Piper
his Galiard, are interspersed with the vocal pieces. There
are, however, as the title makes clear, seven pieces designated
Lachrimæ and they are best played as a whole and consecutively,
as they are on the BIS recording by The Dowland Consort/Jakob
Lindberg (BIS-CD315). Dowland seems to have considered the whole
collection his greatest work and Lachrimæ gementes, Lachrimæ
tristes and Lachrimæ coactæ, omitted here, are no
less important than the other items.
The performance by Sirius Viols here of Lachrimæ
antiquæ (track 2) is noticeably slower than that of the
Dowland Consort on BIS. Honours are about equal in Lachrimæ
antiquæ novæ and the new recordings of Lachrimæ
Amantis and Lachrimæ Veræ are rather faster than
those of the BIS performers. Of course, sad music is meant
to sound doleful, though it’s also part of the contemporary
game that Dowland was playing – melancholy was in fashion and
Dowland was able to pun on his name and the Latin word dolens,
sorrowing. The Dowland Consort seem to me to find just the
right tempo for the opening Lachrimæ antiquæ and The
King’s Noyse/Paul O’Dette on a well-received Harmonia Mundi
recording (HMU907275) are happy with a very similar tempo –
just a few seconds slower, whereas the new recording is a few
seconds slower still.
For my money, the BIS and H-M versions are slow
enough and the new performance just a shade too slow, but comparisons
are particularly odious here, since the consort piece proper
is played on the new CD as an accompaniment to the song which
originally inspired it, Flow my teares. As an accompaniment
to the words ‘No nights are dark enough for those | That in
despaire their last fortuns deplore’, the slower tempo is not
inappropriate. The King’s Noyse take almost exactly the same
time as the new recording for their separate performance of
the song.
Lachrimæ antiquæ is followed on the new
recording by another item from the Lachrimæ collection,
The Earle of Essex his Galiard. The effect of this is
to vary the mood from the two melancholy opening pieces to the
lively galliard but, surely, if Dowland had intended to vary
the mood in this way he would have rearranged the pieces thus
in the publication. The King’s Noyse perform the seven Lachrimæ
last on their recording, not first as on BIS, but they do perform
them all in sequence. On paper, Sirius play the galliard rather
more slowly than The Dowland Consort or The King’s Noyse but
this is due to the fact that they observe more repeats – their
basic tempo is, if anything, a little faster, thereby increasing
the effect of variety.
The other galliard, for Captain Digorie Piper (tr.9)
is taken by Sirius at much the same tempo as The Dowland Consort
and The King’s Noyse, but the remaining consort work, Semper
Dowland semper dolens (tr.11), receives a fairly brisk treatment,
faster than either of the rival recordings and just a little
too brisk, I think, for the piece which forms the central plank
of Dowland’s melancholy. At this tempo it creates a slightly
lighter interlude between ‘Sorrow, stay’ (tr.10) and ‘Come heavy
sleepe’ (tr.12), so the tempo is not inappropriate in context.
In any case, as I’ve already indicated, the melancholy was part
of an elaborate game: look at Hilliard’s famous miniature of
the young man mooning by the rose tree, an appropriate illustration
for Dowland, as chosen by the Rose Consort for the cover of
their Amon Ra recording of Lachrimæ.
In the other Lachrimæ there is little to
choose: The King’s Noyse offer the fastest version of Lachrimæ
amantis and Lachrimæ veræ and The Dowland Consort
the slowest, with Sirius Viols splitting the difference, but
there isn’t all that much in it – perhaps The Dowland Consort
milk the melancholy here just a little too much and Sirius have
it just about right.
As far as the consort items are concerned, then,
honours are about even between the new recording and its rivals
on Harmonia Mundi and BIS – if you don’t mind having only four
of the seven Lachrimæ and don’t mind having these four
items and the other consort pieces from the collection interspersed
with the songs.
Most people of my generation probably first got
to know the vocal music of Dowland and his contemporaries in
recordings for voice and guitar or lute by Peter Pears and Julian
Bream, on a 10” Decca mono LP and later on RCA, the latter recording
still available, with music by Thomas Morley and others, on
88697049272 – an excellent recording, but why is it now at full
price when these 1960s recordings were, till recently, available
at mid price? Those recordings established the idea that the
songs should always be performed by solo voice with solo accompaniment,
but there have been other recordings which have varied the size
of the accompaniment, as on the new recording, notably Emma
Kirkby’s recordings with The Consort of Musicke, the first book
of which has recently been reissued on lower-mid-price Decca
British Music (4750482) and, an identical programme with a different
cover, on mid-price Decca/Oiseau-Lyre (4759114).
Mention of Emma Kirkby in this context is particularly
apt, since the purity of Dorothee Mields’ singing frequently
reminds me of Kirkby in her prime and there is no greater praise
than that in my book – until, that is, one compares Mields with
the ‘real thing’. Kirkby takes Flow my teares at a much
faster pace (with Anthony Rooley on BIS SACD1475) yet conveys
even more of its emotional content. Those words from this song
which I have already quoted, ‘No nights are dark enough for
those | That in despaire their last fortuns deplore’ come over
with much greater weight from Kirkby and Rooley, even at their
faster speed. I seem to be making BIS the prime providers of
Dowland but I think that you’ll hear the difference even if
you just listen to the 30 seconds of Kirkby’s Flow my teares
that are offered by download sites.
Of course, the BIS recording Honey from the
Hive, Dowland’s music for his Elizabethan patrons, is not
a direct rival to the new recording, since only two items overlap.
In Time stands still, Kirkby adopts a slightly slower
tempo than Mields, which I find rather more in keeping with
the thoughtful nature of the song, though there is little wrong
with the new performance when heard on its own and little to
choose between the two performances as far as vocal quality
is concerned. Don’t just take my word for it: Em Marshall thought
Honey from the Hive ‘a superb version of Dowland’s
inventive and touching songs’ – see review.
The title song of the new collection is In darkness
let me dwell. If Semper Downland semper dolens is,
for me, his archetypal consort piece, this must be his archetypal
song and it has to be Peter Pears and Julian Bream performing
it, in memory of that 10” record on which I first heard it.
I’m not normally a great Pears fan but his plangent tones are
just right for this piece, though the RCA remake doesn’t quite
evoke the mood as much as the mono Decca recording. If you
can stand the intrusive ads at the beginning of the tracks,
you can hear this and the rest of the Pears/Bream CD free on
We7.com and, if you like what you hear, follow the link to download
the recording from iTunes. At £8.99, I suppose it’s worth the
small saving over the cost of the CD but it’s slightly cheaper
(£7.99) as a download from Amazon.co.uk.
After Pears and Bream I expected to find Mields’
performance of In darkness something of an anti-climax,
but I have to admit that she holds her own pretty well here,
though she is much less forthright in her misery than Pears
and she can’t get the same degree of wavering melancholy that
he achieves at the words ‘my music, my music hellish jarring
sounds’. She also totally fails to pronounce the word ‘woes’
correctly – which is unusual because her English diction is
otherwise well-night faultless. The libretto doesn’t help,
either, in this song, with its uncharacteristic typo darness
for darkness.
I don’t think most purchasers will be seriously
disappointed with this new Deutsche Harmonia Mundi CD. The
recorded sound is good and the booklet interesting, if hardly
very informative about the music. I just happen to prefer Lachrimæ
complete and its component parts performed consecutively and
I continue to prefer the BIS and Oiseau-Lyre Kirby collections
which I’ve mentioned. There are many DHM recordings in my collection
which I treasure; this narrowly fails to be numbered among them,
though I’m almost tempted to add it to their number for the
beauty of Mields’ singing in her unscheduled bonus addition
to the final track, The dark is my delight. Don’t take
off the CD after the scheduled 5:08, or you’ll miss it.
May I also make a plea here for someone (Regis?)
to reissue the James Bowman-Robert Spencer Saga recording of Dowland
Ayres and lute-lessons, last seen on SCD9004? It’s short
(47 minutes) but well worth rescuing. And don’t forget Naxos’s
ongoing series of Dowland’s lute music with Nigel North – see
my review
of Volume 3 (8.570449) with links to reviews of earlier volumes.
I hope to include reviews of North’s two Linn recordings of music
by Dowland and his contemporaries (CKD097 and CKD176) in my next
Download Roundup.
Brian
Wilson
