This is something of a concept album. It’s also a programme
that has been toured and performed in concert many times and reaches
fruition as a disc. It takes Elizabethan and Jacobean lute music
and marries it to the poetry and theatre of the time. Sometimes
a single track is given over to verse or a short scene from a
play, spoken by Robert Aubry Davis; but also we hear a speech
or lyric spoken above, as it were, lute accompaniment. This sometimes
makes things difficult to judge artistically vis a vis Ronn McFarlane’s
lute playing, but it’s a disc to be measured against a rather
wider canvass than usual, a multi-disciplinary words and music
presentation.
Most of the music is by Dowland, but there is one piece by Campion,
another by Byrd and others by our old pal, Anonymous. The theatrical
performances derive from Shakespeare - Henry VIII, The Taming
of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona - as well as Thomas
Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness. There are poems
by Wyatt, with which we begin and end, Robert Herrick and Samuel
Daniel. Thomas D’Urfey’s wickedly naughty
The Wanton
Trick is here too.
As an example of a theatrical presentation it works well. Whether
it has longevity on disc is a moot point, because some of the
extracts are very brief, and also because the lute, played behind
the voice, is demonstrably there for evocative effect. Ronn McFarlane
has a number of discs to his name of lute music and is indeed
a fine player. There are times when he inclined to the brusque
and overly metrical - one thinks of
Mrs Winter’s Jump
for example; the woman in question must have been quite a motoric
figure if his playing is anything to go by. Nigel North, in his
complete Dowland set for Naxos, is altogether more pliant and
refined. This element of impatience also seems to me slightly
to limit appreciation of
Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home;
I admire the verve but it lacks North’s sense of colour.
Nor in truth does he possess the clarity of North in the ‘tremolo’
study that is
A Fancy.
Next we have the spoken element. The method in the Wyatt ‘title
track’, and others, is this. Davis speaks the first stanza,
and then McFarlane joins in behind him. Note though that they
were separately recorded. Apart from a tendency to pronounce the
word ‘tunes’ as ‘toons’ his reading of
the poem is good, but the other Wyatt setting, of
My Lute Awakes
is infuriatingly mannered. Elsewhere he batters
Like as the
Lute through constant over-emphases, and in the Campion pronounces
‘doth’ to rhyme with cloth. Is this an American thing?
But the apogee for thrice named Robert Aubry Davis occurs in the
Shrew scene, where he contrives to turn Hortensio into
a cross between Sir Harry Lauder and Dame Margaret Rutherford
(and not in a good way). Quite where he dredged up this bizarre
accent beats me. It’s a shame because he can do a perfectly
reasonable English accent with verve, as he does in the D’Urfey.
The texts are printed in full, and the booklet has been nicely
designed and amusingly written (by Davis). Indeed the disc is
cleverly programmed. It’s not for me, though.
Jonathan Woolf
Track listing
ANONYMOUS
Bonny Sweet Boy [1:14]
Blame Not My Lute and
Blame Not My Lute [2:54]
John DOWLAND (1563-1626)
My Lady Hudson's Puffe [1:26]
Melancholy Galliard and
Henry VIII, Act III, Scene i [3:00]
ANONYMOUS
Kemp's Jig [1:11]
Packington's Pound [1:47]
A Woman Killed with Kindness [2:39]
John DOWLAND
Lachrimae [4:46]
The Taming of the Shrew, Act II, Scene i [1:13]
John DOWLAND
Mrs. Winter's Jump [0:47]
ANONYMOUS
Go From My Window and
Like As the Lute [2:32]
Thomas CAMPION (1567-1620)
When to Her Lute Corinna Sings and
When to Her Lute Corinna
Sings [1:07]
Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home [1:18]
Upon Julia's Voice [0:24]
William BYRD (1539/40-1623)
Pavana Bray [4:51]
John DOWLAND
Piper's Galliard and
If Music and Sweet Poetry Agree [2:22]
ANONYMOUS
Peg-a-ramsey / Robin Reddock and
The Wanton Trick [2:28]
The Two Gentleman of Verona, Act III, Scene ii [0:23]
John DOWLAND
A Fancy [3:10]
Fortune My Foe and
Objections Against the Immortality of the
Soul [4:43]
Queen Elizabeth's Galliard [1:14]
Tarleton's Resurrection and
My Lute Awake [4:51]
Ronn McFarlane (lute) 
